A group of folks from our local community came to the first community meeting on April 16th.
The group was very focused on Federal Payor option, and it was in consensus that it should be an option.
A bunch of notes were created, and stories shared. m
More coming soon!
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Andrew Leonard
Dec. 10, 2008 |
"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."
That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.
Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)
Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.
Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.
That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.
And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.
There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs.
You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right down the hill from Chu's offices above the campus of U.C. Berkeley. There's also no question that the political climate for biofuels has changed drastically since February 2007.
But for those who bemoaned the Bush administration's steadfast opposition to taking action on climate change and its criminal abuse of the scientific method, there's reason to cheer. The sight of a scientist whose professed goal is to combat climate change and wean the U.S. from dependence on oil put in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy is welcome indeed. You could almost call it change.
-- Andrew Leonard
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This video is dedicated to the movement that has taken place in this country. We couldn't have done it without Barack Obama and the millions of people who work for change everyday...
This year for the first time since the 1960’s many young people have become engaged in politics and now comes a new documentary film that compares today’s youth movement to the one of forty years ago.
The Bay Area’s own Arturo Perez showcases WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? You'll journey with him as he takes you down a hilarious and emotional roller coaster as he and his two friends search for the voices of the future. WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? premiered at the Wine Country Film Festival, and is being showcased online at www.FlowersTheMovie.com
Like Michael Moore's SLACKER UPRISING Arturo is streaming the entire film online for all to see for FREE with the hopes that even more people will become energized about voting for Obama this November!
Watch the entire film for FREE now at: www.FlowersThemovie.com
In Berkeley, California, there are people who are disgruntled with Barack Obama. They don't like the way he voted on FISA. They think he's moving to the center. They're not sure he's going to get out of Iraq as promptly as they want him to. They're uneasy about what he's said about faith-based initiatives.
Some of these people are members of the Green Party, the same people who tried to tell us in 2000 that there was no real difference between the Democrats and the GOP. We all saw how untrue THAT turned out to be. Others are progressives who vote consistently, though almost always unhappily, for the Democratic candidate. I know the feeling. I voted unhappily for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, and Gore. (Yes, Gore. And now he's my hero.)
But I'm not voting unhappily for Obama; I'm voting for him in the fierce and passionate hope that he will win. Not because he's more progressive in his views than these others--though he is--but because I've finally realized that you can't change this country from the top down. You can't walk into the Oval Office and govern a complex nation as though everyone in it is in agreement.
For years the American public has felt powerless in the face of the depressing spectacle of two candidates saying ugly things about each other, powerless to know who was telling the truth, too disgusted to care.
Barack Obama knows how you change that. He learned how from community organizing, and he's put that knowledge to work in every one of the fifty states. He's gotten people engaged in the process who will be voting for the first time. He's got Field Coordinators who never before saw themselves as political. On his website and at his headquarters volunteers are encouraged to take initiative, to organize their own events, coordinate their own fund-raising drives. The campaign offers tools and training that make these things possible for people who are doing them for the first time. I've never before seen a campaign be so trusting of average voters. Obama truly wants to make this country more democratic, to give people the power to make political change. For my money, that's a lot more radical than taking the perfect, pure position on every issue out there.
Because the reality is, if we hang tough on every issue, nothing will change. Even if we get a filibuster-proof Senate (a long shot), a lot of those Democrats will be from the conservative wing of the party, and the people they represent don't want them voting for some of the legislation we on the left would so dearly like to see passed.
I just finished reading Obama's Dreams from my Father, and one sentence struck me more than any other in the book. In discussing Harold Washington, mayor of Chicago, Obama speaks of the groups among Washington's base who grumbled about him. One of these–crucially–is “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.”
I think I was in that category once. I'm not any more.
I went to Berkeley in the early 90s, so I'm a little biased in favor of underdogs, especially intelligent, perceptive, rules savvy-underdogs, beating up elites. If you have any image of Cal football, it is probably what has become known as "The Play," aka the end of the 1982 Big Game or "the goofy play with all the laterals and the guy hitting the trombone player in the endzone." I think it is a decent metaphor for the way Obama has gone about securing the Democratic nomination, and particularly the short sightedness of the Clinton campaign that created the possibility that it could happen.
So in general I really like phonebanking. I don't know why. I had a guy tell me I was good at it once, and I guess that idea stuck. So probably over the next couple of days I'll do some phonebanking. I think it's a pretty neat way to connect with real people.
But one thing that disappoints me -- at Berkeley there's always a table set up on Sproul Plaza advertising for Hillary, but no Barack supporters in sight! I wish I had the time to set up something.
I really want Obama to win, but I don't quite know why. I don't feel like I've spent enough time following the campaigns of the other candidates to be an informed voter. But I know that we need a Democrat in the White House, and in my view that's more likely to occur if the nominee is Barack. Hillary just rubs me the wrong way...
I'd really love to get involved in working for the campaign. I'm so excited to be going to Berkeley partly because I know I'll be able to get involved with political action there. I really want to make a difference in this election, and not just by casting my own vote! I just don't know how useful I can be in Orange County...I'll wait until I can call Berkeley home before trying anything...
