When officials in Marin County, California announced they would form their own public power agency in order to offer residents a cleaner energy mix than the state's mega-utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation (PG&E), local community activists were glad.
In response to the failed Christmas day bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, US officials and the Obama administration made a very public show of shifting their already turbo-charged 'war on terror' into overdrive. Here in the US, officials - aided by the corporate media - attempted to reassure a terror-weary American public with nationally televised displays of stepped up screenings at airports, increased numbers of air marshals on international flights and the addition of hundreds of names to the CIA's 'terrorist watch list.' Sana'a, Capital of Yemen
The elaborate Congressional circus whimsically referred to as 'healthcare reform' - the one that has held the nation captive since President Obama's earliest weeks in office - came complete with dancing clowns, disappearing acts and trained tigers jumping through hoops. But today the magic is gone. The performance is degenerating. The public is beginning to understand what the political players knew all along - that this three ring circus was never meant to be more than a sideshow.
It was only a matter of time before the nation’s skyrocketing unemployment translated into new recruits for the most powerful military force in the world.
With the official US unemployment rate at 10 percent and climbing (that’s more than 15 million people struggling to put food on the table) and nearly double that number if you include part-time wage-earners who need full-time jobs, never mind all of those ‘discouraged workers,’ it’s little wonder that so many of the nation’s jobless are flocking into its military recruitment offices.
President Barack Obama has a choice to make - and it is one of Faustian proportions. He needs to decide who he wants to be, and how he wants history - and his children - to remember him. More specifically, he needs to decide whether he wants to be a Great Leader or whether to play it safe in the interest of being a two-term president.
If conventional media wisdom is to be believed, President Obama's top climate and energy adviser Carol Browner's admission in early October that there will be no climate legislation coming out of Congress this year pretty much dooms the upcoming UN climate talks in Copenhagen.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019