Monday Reads: Political Ink

Good Morning!

Here’s a little bit of this and that to get  your political juices flowing for the week.

The NYT profiles potential FED chair candidate La La Summers as some one that has many flaws but much power and personal wealth.  He has the credentials and the connections but does he really have the gravitas for the job?

Mr. Summers’s wealth comes mainly from two periods of private sector work between government postings. After a lengthy tenure at the Treasury Department in the 1990s, he became the president of Harvard — a job that Robert E. Rubin, who preceded Mr. Summers as Treasury secretary, helped him obtain.

But in 2006, Mr. Summers was forced out of the university presidency for a variety of reasons, including remarks he made questioning why few women engage in advanced scientific and mathematical work. Soon after, a young Harvard alum brought him into the hedge fund world with a part-time posting at D. E. Shaw. That firm, one of the largest in the industry, paid Mr. Summers more than $5 million.

Mr. Summers’s wealth soared from around $400,000 in the mid-1990s to between $7 million and $31 million in 2009, when he joined the Obama administration, according to a financial disclosure he filed at the time. Before returning to government service, he earned $2.7 million from speeches in one year alone.

As for his current work, representatives for Citigroup, Nasdaq and D. E. Shaw declined to disclose his pay. His speaking rates today run into the six figures, according to an associate who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Mr. Summers has spoken to Wall Street companies like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

The job that is likely to generate the most scrutiny for Mr. Summers is his work with Citigroup, which was rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by the federal government’s bailout. Though he does not have an office there, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said he was a regular consultant. In a statement, Citigroup said he provided “insight on a broad range of topics including the global and domestic economy” to prestigious clients, and attended internal meetings.

Citigroup hired Mr. Summers in part to advise Vikram S. Pandit, who resigned as chief executive last year. With his work there, Mr. Summers followed in the footsteps of his friend, Mr. Rubin, who joined Citigroup after he left the government and earned more than $100 million.

Another political analyst–this one writing for Bloomberg–thinks that the Republicans are inching towards civil war and that the next election may look like 1964.  The focus has been on the Paul-Christie rift.

As Republicans continue to sort through their future, having lost the popular vote for president in five of the last six elections, they are having intramural battles with echoes of 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the nomination at a convention rife with division over the role of the U.S. in the world and civil rights at home. Derided as an extremist, he went on to lose to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide.

Now, Republicans are squabbling over the National Security Agency surveillance program, immigration and gay marriage. The Christie-Paul rift last week highlighted the divide, with the governor calling the senator’s criticism of the NSA program “dangerous” and the Kentuckian responding that his critic must have forgotten the Bill of Rights.

“It’s always healthy to have discussions from different wings of the party as the party works on its identity going into the midterms,” said LaTourette, who chose not to seek re-election to Congress in 2012 citing the extreme positions among some of his Republican colleagues. “It wouldn’t be so healthy if this was next year or 2015 and the focus is on who the presidential nominee will be.

Martin Luther King III has a written a book on what it meant to grow up the footsteps of his father. Even better, you can get it to read with your child or grandchildren because it is written for children!!  You can read about or listen to an NPR interview with King here.

Martin Luther King III recounts this and other stories from his childhood in his new children’s book, My Daddy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King III had been thinking about writing about his child’s-eye view of his father for almost a decade, but the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington became a personal deadline. The book, written for young children, has just been published, three weeks ahead of the anniversary.

Now Martin Luther King III and his wife, Andrea, have a 5-year-old daughter, Yolanda Renée. She was named for Martin Luther King III’s oldest sister, who died suddenly in 2006. In the book, young Martin Luther King III tells readers about the games he played with his father.

Martin Luther King III also retells stories of accompanying his father on marches from time to time. On one, they were confronted by a police officer “with a huge dog that growled at me. I was terrified.” That is, he was scared until his dad took his hand and told him they would be fine.

“I felt safe. My dad was not a tall man, but he always made me feel like he was a giant. I was never afraid when I was with him,” Martin Luther King III writes.

Long after his father’s death, Martin Luther King III has had to deal with others’ expectations that he would take up the cause. King is deeply grateful that decades ago, his mother relieved him of some of that pressure.

“You don’t have to be your father,” Coretta Scott King told him. “Just be your best self, whatever that is. We are going to support you.”

This has to be the worst use of tax dollars that I’ve seen in years. A report shows State-Funded Crisis Pregnancy Centers Talk Women Out Of Birth Control and Condoms. Is this really the way to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions?

When a woman walked into a state-funded “crisis pregnancy center” in Manassas, Va., this summer and told the counselor she might be pregnant, she was told that condoms don’t actually prevent STDs and that birth control frequently causes hair loss, memory loss, headaches, weight gain, fatal blood clots and breast cancer.

“The first three ingredients in the birth control pill are carcinogens,” the CPC counselor said, adding that she always tries to talk women out of taking it.

The counselor also told the woman that condoms are not effective at preventing pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases because they are “naturally porous.”

“Safe sex is a joke,” she said. “There’s no such thing.”

NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia recorded the exchange, released Wednesday, as part of its undercover investigation into the 58 state-funded “crisis pregnancy centers” in Virginia. The organizations are part of a national network of about 2,500 Christian centers that advertise health and pregnancy services, but do not offer abortions, contraception or prenatal care. Instead, they are intended to talk women out of having abortions and to advocate abstinence until marriage.

These organizations receive state money through the sale of “Choose Life” license plates at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, sponsored the legislation that established that fundraising system during his time in the state senate.

NARAL sent undercover women into several crisis pregnancy centers throughout Virginia and recorded their interactions. The investigation revealed that 71 percent of the CPCs in Virginia give out medically inaccurate information about the health consequences and effectiveness of birth control, condoms and abortion.

According to the report, in addition to criticizing the use of birth control and condoms, 40 of the CPCs told women that abortion causes long-term psychological damage and leads women to develop eating disorders and drug addictions. One counselor allegedly told NARAL’s undercover investigator that if she was a certain blood type, the abortion could cause her body to create antibodies that would attack her fetus the next time she tried to get pregnant.

Greg Mitchell recalls interviewing the man that dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima in this blog post.

Paul W. Tibbets, pilot of the plane, the “Enola Gay” (named for his mother), which dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. died at 92 in 2007,  defending the bombing to the end of his life. Some of the obits noted that he had requested no funeral or headstone for his grave, not wishing to create an opportunity for protestors to gather.

I had a chance to interview Tibbets nearly 30 years ago, and wrote about it for several newspapers and magazines and in the book I wrote with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America.

The hook for the interview was this: While spending a month in Japan on a grant in 1984, I met a man named Akihiro Takahashi. He was one of the many child victims of the atomic attack, but unlike most of them, he survived (though with horrific burns and other injuries), and grew up to become a director of the memorial museum in Hiroshima. The August 6 bombing led to the deaths of at least 75,000 people in a flash and at least that many more in the days and years that followed. At least 90% of them were civilians, mainly women and children.

Takahashi showed me personal letters to and from Tibbets, which had led to a remarkable meeting between the two elderly men in Washington, D.C. At that recent meeting, Takahashi expressed forgiveness, admitted Japan?s aggression and cruelty in the war, and then pressed Tibbets to acknowledge that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was always wrong.

But the pilot (who had not met one of the Japanese survivors previously) was non-committal in his response, while volunteering that wars were a very bad idea in the nuclear age. Takahashi swore he saw a tear in the corner of one of Tibbets’ eyes.

So, on May 6, 1985, I called Tibbets at his office at Executive Jet Aviation in Columbus, Ohio, and in surprisingly short order, he got on the horn. He confirmed the meeting with Takahashi (he agreed to do that only out of “courtesy”) and most of the details, but scoffed at the notion of shedding any tears over the bombing. That was, in fact, “bullshit.”
“I’ve got a standard answer on that,” he informed me, referring to guilt. “I felt nothing about i.” .I’m sorry for Takahashi and the others who got burned up down there, but I felt sorry for those who died at Pearl Harbor, too….People get mad when I say this but — it was as impersonal as could be. There wasn’t anything personal as far as I?m concerned, so I had no personal part in it.

“It wasn’t my decision to make morally, one way or another. I did what I was told — I didn’t invent the bomb, I just dropped the damn thing. It was a success, and that’s where I?ve left it. I can assure you that I sleep just as peacefully as anybody can sleep.”  When August 6 rolled around each year “sometimes people have to tell me. To me it’s just another day.”

So, we have a few Texas Sky Dancers here. This Guardian article on Texas being all Oil and no Water is kind’ve frightening.

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

“The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,” she said, blinking back tears. “I went: ‘dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind.”

Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart’s case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town — a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire’s property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town’s central water supply. “Everyone just said: ‘too bad’. Well now it’s all going dry,” McGuire said.

Ranchers dumped most of their herds. Cotton farmers lost up to half their crops. The extra draw down, coupled with drought, made it impossible for local ranchers to feed and water their herds, said Buck Owens. In a good year, Owens used to run 500 cattle and up to 8,000 goats on his 7,689 leased hectares (19,000 acres). Now he’s down to a few hundred goats.

The drought undoubtedly took its toll but Owens reserved his anger for the contractors who drilled 104 water wells on his leased land, to supply the oil companies.

So, what is on your reading and blogging list today?