| Jackson Browne Backs Off Support for Pro-Nuke Obama
On Capitol Hill today, there was a press conference. Three members of Congress - Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), John Hall (D-New York), and Shelley Berkley (D-Nevada) - were there. Activists like Harvey Wasserman and David Fenton - were there. And musicians including Hall, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash - who were among the organizers, with Wasserman, of the 1979 No Nukes Concerts in Madison Square Garden, which played a prominent role in galvanizing citizen energy against nuclear power - were there. Environmental leaders from NRDC, Greenpeace, U.S. PIRG, Public Citzen, Sierra Club, the Environmental Working Group, the League of Conservation Voters, among others - were there. They made arguments against pending legislation that will grant massive loan guarantees to nuclear power companies to build new reactors.
Channeling Suze Orman
I was near the deadline for a column when I glanced at a TV screen. "The Suze Orman Show," airing on CNBC at prime time, exerted a powerful force in my hotel room. And the fate of this column was sealed.Orman made a big splash many years ago on public television — the incubating environment for her as a national phenom. With articulate calls for intelligent self-determination of one's own financial future, she is a master of the long form. Humor and dramatic cadences punch up the impacts of her performances. Seeing her the other night, within a matter of seconds, I realized that the jig was up. How could a mere underachieving syndicated columnist hope to withstand the blandishments and certainties of Suze Orman, bestselling author and revered eminence from the erudite bastions of PBS to the hard-boiled financial realms of General Electric's CNBC? To resist was pointless.
The Free Market: A False Idol After All?
FOR more than a quarter-century, the dominant idea guiding economic policy in the United States and much of the globe has been that the market is unfailingly wise. So wise that the proper role for government is to steer clear and not mess with the gusher of wealth that will flow, trickling down to the every level of society, if only the market is left to do its magic. That notion has carried the day as industries have been unshackled from regulation, and as taxes have been rolled back, along with the oversight powers of government. Faith in markets has held sway as insurance companies have fended off calls for more government-financed health care, and as banks have engineered webs of finance that have turned houses from mere abodes into assets traded like dot-com stocks. But lately, a striking unease with market forces has entered the conversation.
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