This is a series of longer in-depth articles on a variety of subjects written by academics or professionals in their field suitable for weekend reading.
Ronald Kessler: Obama’s Mythology About Pastor Wright
Robert Kessler is the chief Washington correspondent of www.Newsmax.com and a New York Times best-selling author. This story from the Cutting Edge News offers some background on Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the now retired Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ and Obama’s spiritual guide of 20 years.
Steve Fraser: Our Gilded Age and The Other One
Steve Fraser is the author of, among other works, the just published Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum magazine and a contributor at TomDispatch. This article compares the Gilded Age in America (1870-1910) and compares it to our current era. Mr. Fraser has a forthcoming book on the subject.
Hard Truths About Energy from National Petroleum Council
Energy is a complex subject, touching every part of daily life and the overall economy, involving a wide variety of technologies, and deeply affecting many aspects of interational relations. The United States is the largest participant in the global energy system—the largest consumer, the second largest producer of coal and natural gas, and the largest importer and third largest producer of oil. Developing a framework for considering America’s oil and natural gas position now and for the future requires a broad view and a long-term perspective; both are provided in this report from the National Petroleum Council looking at global energy markets and their prospects through 2030. The report runs 270 pages and is available for a free download in a pdf format. It is excellent reference material.
Global Fish Stocks
The state of the world’s fisheries with graphs and tables from the world over in this brief report from The Global Education Project. The key finding is that “75% of the major marine fish stocks are either depleted, overexploited or being fished at their biological limit.”
Election Monitoring
I have monitored elections in Sri Lanka, Haiti, Argentina, the United States, Honduras, Cambodia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It’s become a hobby that enables me to travel to exotic destinations and watch democracy in action. Here’s a primer on what’s involved from Beyond Intractability.
Via Talk Left where Jeralyn Merritt once again notes that Obama “tends to be all over the place on gun rights.” In an interview today with the Chicago Sun Times, Obama once again contradicts what he has said earlier on the campaign trail.
Obama starts out by noting “that’s why I reached across the aisle.” He reached across the aisle alright and embraced Cheney’s energy policy. He voted for it because it had the largest incentives ever for alternative energy? It was still a pittance and what he doesn’t tell you is that that bill also had $6.0 billion in subsidies for oil & gas companies, companies whose employees are contributing to his campaign. It provided for tax incentitives that allow oil & gas companies to depreciate their equipment at a faster rate than normal. It waived royalty payments for drilling in offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and Prudhoe Bay, an estimated $60 billion windfall for oil & gas companies over 30 years. It exempted oil & gas companies from complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act and from the Federal Water Pollution Control Act for their construction activities surrounding oil and gas drilling.
There certainly are states that Obama might win that Clinton probably can’t — Nevada, Iowa, even Nebraska and North Dakota — but the latest national polling roundup assembled by former White House political chief Karl Rove shows McCain leading Obama in states with 261 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win, while against Clinton, he has 214.
Also, Republican pollster Whit Ayres noted that four focus groups which he has conducted among blue-collar whites in Michigan and Missouri show “they are open to voting for Hillary Clinton, but there’s no way in hell they are going for Obama. It’s cultural.”
“They just don’t think he’s a patriotic American. It’s the flag pin, his church, his wife’s statement that most Americans are ‘mean.’ As one woman said in one of these groups, ‘I don’t think he bleeds red, white and blue.’”
Ayres also polled Tennessee — a GOP-leaning state — for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R) and found that Clinton would lose to McCain by 8 points, but that Obama would lose by 20 points. Twenty-five percent of Democrats said they would not vote for Obama.
Having run ads in Pennsylvania claiming that he doesn’t take money from oil companies, Obama continues to rake in cash from oil executive according to this article from the Los Angeles Times. Some of the highlights include:
Obama has taken at least $263,000 from oil company executives, family members and employees since entering the presidential race last year, including $46,000 last month. At least $140,000 has come in chunks of between $1,000 and $2,300, the maximum permitted under federal law. Texas oil executive Robert L. Cavnar of Milagro Exploration and his wife, Gracie, have helped the Illinois Democrat raise at least another $50,000 by helping host a fundraiser earlier in the campaign.
Other oil industry donors have included Sinclair Oil President Ross Matthews of Texas and John B. Hess, chairman of Hess Corp., a New York-based oil producer and retailer with operations worldwide. Hess, who has given to other presidential candidates, including Sen. John McCain, gave $2,300 to Obama last year, as did his wife, Susan. Hess gave $14,000 to Obama’s Senate run in 2003.
Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for highlighting the duplicitous nature of the Obama campaign. I won’t go as far to say that the media coverage on Obama has turned negative completely but there does seem to be more and more reporting exposing Obama’s hypocrisy, flaws, misstatements and lack of electoral viability. It’s about time.
Tonight on PBS, the Reverend Wright, Obama’s Pastor for more than 20 years, will give his first broadcast interview to Bill Moyers since some of his controversial remarks first gained wider national attention. In this preview clip, the Reverend Wright’s remark should dent Obama’s claims that Obama transcends the old school of politics and that Obama is, in fact, just another politician. In one fell swoop, the Reverend Wright has undercut Obama’s speech on racial issues in Philadelphia by noting that he “said what he needed to say” because Obama is “a politician”. This is bound to hurt as the story regains national attention. And the Reverend Wright has a jammed-pack weekend schedule with appearances in Dallas and Detroit followed by an appearance in Washington DC at the National Press Club. The story will have legs through the middle of the week and beyond.
I wonder if the Obama campaign will try to get him to cancel those appearances just like they cancelled his appearance in Springfield in February 2007 where he was set to give the invocation at Obama’s Presidential bid kick-off. I still want to know how the following rant on January 13, 2008 is appropriate for a sermon:
What precisely is out of context when the Reverend Wright rambles that “Hillary ain’t ever been called a nigger”? And how exactly is what he is saying part of his “pastoral” mission? So Obama is a politician and the Reverend Wright a pastor. The former is most certainly true, the latter is hard to believe. The Reverend Wright sure does have his “hate on” then. And some of us aren’t ever going to forget it nor excuse it especially since neither apologies nor a mere statement of regret seem to be forthcoming.
Here is today’s edition of interesting reads from around the world.
Crisis in Zimbabwe Affecting Commerce Throughout Africa
The Common Market for East and Southern Africa (Comesa) summit scheduled for next month is the first casualty and has been postponed as the political uncertianity in Zimbabwe continues to grow. The story from The East African Standard.
Gay Bishop to Marry
Bishop Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal prelate whose consecration led conservatives to split from the church, said in an interview on Thursday that he and his partner of 20 years were planning a civil union ceremony to be held in his home church in the diocese of New Hampshire in June according to The New York Times.
China’s Investments in Africa Continue to Grow
The story in today’s UK Guardian.
When All Else Fails, Nationalisation Is Chavez’s Cure
In a move sure to upset Mexico, Colombia and the United States, Venezuelan President has opted to nationalise Venezuela’s Cement Industry.
Kosovo’s Painful Birth
I still think this the grandest of errors to recognise Kosovar independence. An update from Germany’s Der Spiegel.
Today’s Bonus
Paul Krugman is at his usual brilliant self in his op-ed in today’s New York Times entitled Self-Inflicted Confusion. Of course, Obama’s supporters will wail that he has lost all obectivity. Personally I think that’s better than losing in November.
The above video from my favourite British sit-com, The Vicar of Dibley, provides a moment of levity as well as affords me a perfect introduction to analyze bread and butter issues quite literally. Alice (played by Emma Chambers) in her wonderful round-about manner comes to the conclusion that she believes that “in fact there is a lot more butter around than we all thought there was.” She is not wrong, the butter supply is stable but the price of butter has soared some 30%. What is driving the price of butter is that the price of its inputs, namely grain and feed, are rising.
The bread market is different however. It too is affected by the rise of its inputs but the bread market unlike butter is not global, it is quite local. I can go into my local supermarket and buy butter from California, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin, Denmark (the world’s best butter Lurpak), Ireland, France, Spain, Bulgaria, India and New Zealand. My bread comes from Oakland and not much farther. Thus the price of bread has risen faster in part because its market is not a global one. The reasons for that are:
It’s not durable–even if you could keep the loaves from being crushed, it goes stale too quickly.
It is not compact–a container full of bread isn’t worth enough to make it profitable to ship. It certainly isn’t worth enough to pay for the sort of fast shipping by air that would get it to market while it was still fresh. High bulk, low margin, short shelf-life.
It is not uniform–ask someone what bread is and you’ll get a different answer from someone in the United States than you would in France, and a very different answer from someone in India or Egypt. Even within the US there are regional differences for example here in San Francisco we have a passion for sourdough dating back to the Gold Rush era.