Want to see trucks like this?

A final decision on introducing mega trucks has not yet been made on a European level even though they were rejected last year by the European Transport Commissioner, Antonio Tajani.  This comes from the Environmental Transport Association (ETA). See their website which includes a video.

These ‘mega trucks’ would be massively longer and heavier than what is currently permitted. 60-tons as against 40 tons,  25 metres long as against 18.25 metres.

40 tons,  18.25 metres is the current maximum permitted for a lorry in Britain.  (And in Ireland too I presume.)

In comparison, a Boeing 737-300 carrying its maximum 127 passengers weighs 57.6 tons at take-off, making it lighter than a mega-truck, says the ETA, which is part of a pan-European coalition of organisations against the widespread introduction of these trucks. 

A small group of thoughtful people - the only thing that ever changed the world

Read Osborne’s comprehensive spending review and imagined myself back in my role as a trade union convenor. I just couldn't do that any more.  Then I saw an article in the Guardian saying the majority of the population support the cuts. Made me feel ill. Then I read this article in the London Independent by Johann Hari and felt a lot better: Protest works. Just look at the proof.

Thanks to Phil for this.

It finishes “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” (This is by Margaret Mead.  I once knew who she was but I've forgotten. See 42 other quotes here.)

You wouldn't see this over here! CNN anchor belittles Republican candidate

On 19th October, Tea Party supporter Christine O'Donnell, who is the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, made a fool of herself in front of an audience of law students by questioning where in the Constitution the separation of church and state appeared. Commentators have called her a national phenomenon and suggested she may even knock Sarah Palin off her perch at the top of the Tea Party.

Watch the video. Lasts 4:45 minutes 

(By the way, the Republican party establishment was deeply unhappy with O'Donnell winning the primary and getting to be the Republican candidate for the seat, but that’s another story.)

What's on my mind right now, is the difference between American TV and what I'm used to.  The first time I played this I thought it was a Democrat campaign video. Only when I played it a second time, did I appreciate that it was actually part of CNN’s news output.

The video is introduced by Anderson Cooper, a high-profile CNN anchor. A Paxman figure I guess?  It starts with a clip from a debate hosted by a law school, between O'Donnell and Democrat opponent Chris Coons. They are sparring over the teaching evolution in schools. First O’Donnell displays her ignorance of the First Amendment, to guffaws from the audience. Then we get Cooper’s derogatory comments and a series of quickfire clips of O'Donnell digging her grave by spouting about the Constitution. Terrific stuff.

O'Donnell is shown parading a "graduate fellowship from the Claremont Institute in constitutional government".  Cooper the CNN man demolishes this with : "By the way, the graduate fellowship she talks about from the Claremont Institute? The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank, it's not a university, and the fellowship lasted a grand total of seven days ... A lot of people, including myself, get confused about constitutional amendments," Cooper says. "But not a lot of people are running for senate based on their deep analysis and study of the constitution."

The thing is, I can't imagine the BBC or RTÉ screening something like this. It would be called partisan.  I've never really watched much CNN, and I had a mental image of it as being firmly rooted in the right of politics, a sort of Fox News lite.  Clearly I got that all wrong! 

... and climate change a scientific fact ...

And another thing you wouldn't get on the BBC or RTÉ.  Here's an 11-minute piece from a radio programme called All Things Considered on NPR (National Public Radio) describing how a Republican victory in the upcoming congressional elections may mean defeat for Obama’s climate change policy. 

The presenter starts as follows: “The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises. That's a scientific fact. Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon. That too, is a fact. And yet the majority of Republicans running for House and Senate seats this year disagree.”

Would you get a BBC or RTÉ presenter stating climate change facts this baldly?  Especially when it's explicitly a party political issue, as it is in this story. Wouldn't it be “most scientists says” or something along those lines?
 

Posh English voice demands Irish evictions

The credit rating agency Fitch attained notoriety in Ireland recently by calling for people to be evicted from their homes to help balance the banks’ books.  “Fitch wants banks to evict more Irish families” is the headline in one blog I've visited, where someone evoked the Famine with this post : “Just what the situation was lacking: a posh English voice demanding that Irish agents evict Irish people from their homes.”

Apparently Fitch Ratings MD Andrew Currie was interviewed on RTÉ TV News and said that Ireland's banks should foreclose on more residential mortgages.  It’s a terrific story and I wish I could source it in print. So far I haven't come across any evidence that Fitch has explicitly called for evictions. The Irish Times and Irish Examiner both have the following on 9th October: ' “While arrears levels continue to increase, very few loans have yet had their security enforced,” Fitch said, in reference to the relatively low number of repossessions in the Irish market. '

Credit rating agencies are an offshoot of financial journalism.  I recommend an episode of the Australian radio programme Background Briefing, broadcast on 26/7/09.  These agencies have become both critic and chef in the big financial kitchens, the blurb says, but they claim to be really journalists and take no responsibility for their advice; they are probably beyond the law, yet governments have said their advice is mandatory.

A tale told by an idiot

SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

From Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

If there was a competition for the most sublime passage in the English language this would get into the top 3.  Would the other two also be by Shakespeare?
 

Tea Party’s cold war roots

Glenn Beck – huge on the American right

Another must-listen from NPR’s Fresh Air (that’s American National Public Radio).  An interview on 13th October with Historian Sean Wilentz.

He had an article in The New Yorker on Oct 18th: “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War roots.”

He tries to answer the question, why have extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party exploded anew?   And why, this time, have party leaders done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them?

Glenn Beck the educator

You can't hear about the Tea Party without Glenn Beck’s name being mentioned. He is a Fox News host. In the interview Wilentz says Beck has emerged as a unifying figure and intellectual guide for the Tea Party movement.  Polls of Tea Party members show they respect Beck more than anyone else, even Sarah Palin, and that they consider him not as an entertainer but as an educator.  (Rush Limbaugh in the same poll came out as an entertainer - that's the radio talk show host who is hugely influential as a conservative political commentator and opinion leader.) 

Beck presents himself as a truthful historian, in contrast to all the academic historians who are conspiring to hide the truth from the American people.  His bugbear is President Woodrow Wilson (the brains behind the League of Nations).  He claims Wilson was a fascist and cites the following as evidence. In Wilson’s presidency a dime coin was minted depicting war and peace. Peace was an olive branch. War was a bundle of sticks (a Roman symbol known as a fasces.) Later, Mussolini made the fasces the symbol of the Italian fascists. But Beck reversed the order of events and says  'Aha! Who brought the dime in? It was Woodrow Wilson. We've been on the road to fascism for a long time.'

“I started watching Fox News and getting more informed”

Fox News is huge in America and is a megaphone for the Tea Party. On October 14th NPR broadcast interviews with rank and file Tea Partiers to enable them to explain what makes them boil.  Retired financial services worker Shelby Burnett says : "I was unaware of what was going on around me until I retired.  And we started watching Fox News, and getting more informed on what was going on in our nation ..  We were asleep." 

Back to the Sean Wilentz interview on Fresh Air.  He describes the John Birch Society founded in 1958.  This is often mentioned in the same breath as the Tea Party, though I knew little about it. It sprang from the same root as McCarthyism. Robert Welch founded it, and seems to have run it like a dictatorship.  He saw the country as having been taken over by totalitarians, by the communists.  He said Dwight D Eisenhower was part of a communist conspiracy against America.  Wilentz says the Tea Party is reviving the John Birch Society’s ideas. Now Obama is a fascist. Or it is communist.  Can they tell the difference.

Do listen to this interview. 

Koch billionaires and Tea Party funding

David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles
are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more
than $100 million to right-wing causes.  But what's
he up to in this picture? Impersonating Hannibal?

I think I've tracked down the original exposé of the Koch brothers and their funding of the Tea Party and linked right-wing organisations.  It’s an article by Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, in the August 30th edition.  “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama”.

You can hear an interview with Jane Mayer on an American radio show called Fresh Air. 

Fresh Air, I should add, is an excellent programme and I frequently download interviews from their site.

The article "Covert Operations" describes how the brothers' political interests dovetail with their corporate interests. Here's an extract:-

 
“The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry - especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a 'kingpin of climate science denial.' The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies - from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program - that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.”