The (dishonest) madness of George Harvey

Once again (actually, no doubt more than once (see next paragraph), but once more it comes to this writer’s attention) George Harvey betrays his inability to acknowledge any adverse impacts of the energy alternatives he advocates for by setting up a straw man from which he launches an ad hominem dismissal and proceeds to change the subject with his usual non sequitur pabulum.

Harvey maintains a blog, cohosts a community television show, and writes for Green Energy Times, and the first piece referred to here was reprinted in The (Windsor County, Vermont) Commons newspaper from the Clean Technica web site. In fact it was reprinted also in the issue of Green Energy Times (in which issue 13 articles were penned by Harvey) that this writer picked up for another headline (see next two paragraphs). Thus the central example here is unlikely to be unusual.

The headline that caught our eye was “Hanover [N.H.] Pledges to Go 100% Renewable: How Are They Going to Do It?” by Rick Wackernagel. It is not a short article, yet it does not describe how “they are going to do it”. The few plans mentioned are, besides throwing up solar panels everywhere, mostly installing heat pumps, thus switching from fossil fuel burned efficiently on site to electricity (fossil fuel burned inefficiently off site). The one specific plan is that Dartmouth College will replace diesel in its steam heating system with “biofuel”, possibly from Dartmouth’s forests in the White Mountains in the ridiculous accounting by which mowing down forests is credited as “green”. Even this very issue of Green Energy Times mentions (in a book review) the importance of forest protection in reversing climate change and (in a rant against noise regulations for giant wind turbines) the contribution of deforestation to global warming. (The latter writer apparently exempts turning forested mountain ridgelines into energy plants.)

Nowhere is there mention of cutting the town off from the regional grid, so the fact is that they will still get the same electricity as everyone else in New England. Commendably, they plan to use less of it – along with less of other fuels – but “100%” will doubt rely mostly on buying the Enron-invented scam of “green tags”.

Back to George Harvey, ... actually, we have already said all that needs to be said about the piece of his originally mentioned, titled “The Sound of Wind Turbines and the Horror of Genocide”: He sets up a straw man from which he launches an ad hominem dismissal of all dissent and proceeds to change the subject with non sequitur pabulum.

There is, however, another piece by Harvey in the same issue that is actually informative. It is about research to reduce methane emissions from ruminant – particularly cows’ – digestion by adding seaweed to their diet. The results are reported to be quite dramatic, even to the claim of eliminating 99% of the methane.

Yet Harvey neglects to mention that the methane from cows is only part of the climate change contribution and environmental destruction of animal agriculture, which is the leading cause also of deforestation, species loss, water depletion, and ocean dead zones – none of which are due to their flatulence. The subtitle of Harvey’s article invokes helping to save the planet, but it is only about reducing one source of methane emissions, not at all about actually saving the planet. It is about “greenwashing” one of the planet’s primary destroyers.

Two excerpts from Deep South by Paul Theroux (2015)

Hot Springs — Pleasures and Miseries

My afternoon drive from Monticello to Hot Springs was a long panning shot of sad towns and beat-up villages, Warren to Edinburg, which was poor and small and lifeless, and Fordyce, which I’d heard about in Alabama as the birthplace of the beloved coach “Bear” Bryant, a town where every store was shut or abandoned or turned into a thrift shop. At the crossroads on Fordyce’s Main Street, the faded signs and empty premises were a testament that there was no call for Benton Hardware, Farm Implements, a dress shop, or a soda fountain in the Walmart era. Then tiny Tulip, and Malvern, which had some vitality that radiated from Hot Springs, farther along the road.

In a sudden, rocky, high-sided vale of the Ouachita Mountains, with two tall Soviet-looking buildings, one the VA hospital, the other the Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs was a surprise, a spa town with a claim to architectural splendor and the gamy smell of an old circus. The thermal-spa buildings that lined Bath Row were Art Deco marvels well restored, and narrow buildings lined steeply sloping streets on the cliffsides. Half the place was painted, decked out, yet with a residue of its vicious past existence; the other half was blandly residential. The town looked carved from rock in the mountain gap, one of the most dramatic physical settings in any Southern town.

Many signs on the main streets extolled its raffish atmosphere, its criminal history — allusions to the visits of gangsters, gloating mentions of crime, brothels, and sensational murders. “It’s hard to imagine the city as a hotbed for organized crime, such as gambling, prostitution and bootlegging,” said the Hot Springs promotional brochure, piling it on (it was subtitled “The Past Is Where the Fun Is”). “But from the late-1800s through the mid-1900s, especially in the 1930s, Hot Springs was a popular hangout for Al Capone, Frank Costello, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano, and other infamous mobsters. The safe, secluded scenic location of Hot Springs made it the ideal hideout.”

Of the many houses of prostitution, the busiest was “The Mansion,” owned by the celebrated Hot Springs madam Maxine Temple Jones, who catered to the rich and powerful, criminals and politicians. For decades resisting the mob, whom she ratted on in return for a pardon, she stayed in business into the mid-1960s and later wrote a book about her life and times.

“Honey, I like an old-fashioned whorehouse that has respect and dignity,” she told the Arkansas Times in 1982. “And my girls were always very proper. I always taught them what my daddy taught me: to walk tall and always remember that it’s not what you do, but how you do it.”

The gangster era came to an end in the late 1960s and is luridly depicted in the Gangster Museum of America on Central Avenue (“where you won’t be gambling on a good time, but betting on a sure thing!”). Because of its pleasant climate and sleaze, the town had been a destination for spring training for Northern baseball teams from the 1880s to 1940 — a wild era too, when players routinely binged and whored.

That was Hot Springs’s colorful past, but it was the recent past. No place to raise a child, is what you’d say — dangerous, wild, full of malign influences, opportunists, career criminals, tarts, cheats, trimmers, and schemers. Yet that’s what the newly married Virginia Clinton did, accompanying her second husband, Roger, there, her seven-year-old Billy in tow.

Bill Clinton was born in the small, sweetly named town of Hope, in southwestern Arkansas, in 1946, as the often-told story has it in the mythology of the man. But the banal truth is that he grew up — was formed, educated, became a man — in raw, reckless Hot Springs, a hundred miles north, amid its miseries and splendors. His father, William Blythe, was killed in a car crash before he was born. His mother studied nursing, so that she could provide for the boy. In 1950, his mother met and married Roger Clinton, and three years later they moved from Hope to Hot Springs, Roger’s hometown.

“While Bill Clinton’s writings about his boyhood in Hope in the late 1940s acknowledge the racial separation of the town of 7,500 people, his memories are mostly sepia-toned and nostalgic, like those of his Pawpaw’s grocery store,” the Arkansas writer Jay Jennings explains in Carry the Rock (2010). “But in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when cotton was king and Jim Crow was unwritten law, Hope was the site of enough racial murder that it was sometimes called the lynching capital of the South.”

In Hot Springs, Roger Clinton was known as a shiftless drunk. In a town of degenerates, being a boozer was no shame, but Roger proved to be a wife-beater as well as a demented alcoholic, and when young Bill was old enough (he says he was fifteen), he defied his stepfather’s wrath and defended his mother. The marriage ended. Virginia continued working as a nurse anesthetist, but in an expression of hope over experience, she remarried the same pathetic man a year later.

Meanwhile, young Bill studied, learned to play the tenor saxophone, excelled academically at Hot Springs High School, attended church at Park Place Baptist, bought chili cheeseburgers at the Polar Bar (now Baily’s Dairy Treat), ribs at McClard’s Bar-B-Q, apple pie at Club Café, and ice cream at Cook’s Dairy, and went to movies (Elvis movies, biblical epics) at the Paramount and Mako theaters. He tells us this in his autobiography, My Life, displaying great affection for the town and an extraordinary memory for detail.

But he does not say that the theaters’ balconies and back entrances were for blacks, that the motels and restaurants were segregated, and that the black part of Hot Springs was miserably poor and decrepit. Speaking of the time of Governor Orval Faubus’s racist intransigence and of the federal marshals forcing the integration of Little Rock’s Central High, all he says is “Most of my friends were either against integration or unconcerned. I didn’t say too much about it, probably because my family was not especially political, but I hated what Faubus did.” He is equally disengaged when describing segregation in Hot Springs: “It bothered me that Hot Springs’ schools weren’t integrated. The black kids still went to Langston High School.”

One afternoon in Hot Springs, I made a point of driving over to Langston, the neighborhood on the opposite side of town from where Clinton lived. I found broken streets, run-down houses, a wholly black area around the school, Southern impoverishment, the other side of the tracks. Still a disgrace fifty years after Clinton lived in town, still poor and obviously neglected, Langston looked like a black “location” in South Africa, ripe for uplift from an NGO (though none was in sight), the very sort of place that should have been a target for improvement by the Clinton Global Initiative, but wasn’t.

While Clinton was a teenager (and from his account he roamed freely in Hot Springs), gambling was rife, murders were common, gangsters were part of the scene, Maxine Jones’s brothel and many others were thriving, and the town, run by a crooked political machine, was alight with roisterers, whores, and high rollers. You’re bound to wonder what effect that ingrained culture of vice might have had on an impressionable schoolboy.

Contemplating Hot Springs, it is difficult to imagine a more unpromising origin for a president, one so likely to warp a mind or corrupt a soul. Yet the defining characteristics of a president are worldliness and guile. The world in all its bizarre forms had come to Hot Springs, and Clinton was buoyant in it; the town was clearly the making of the man. In My Life, Clinton repeats the tedious Hot Springs boast of larger-than-life visitors — “outlaws, mobsters, military heroes, actors, and a host of baseball greats” — and describes his upbringing: the abusive stepfather, the hardworking and loving mother (who was also a drinker, gambler, chain smoker, and harmless flirt — an Auntie Mame type, adored by her son), his love of the tenor sax, his visits to relatives, his after-school job at the small grocery, his classes as a math whiz, his dabbling in student politics, his earnest posturing that successfully masked a troubled home life.

The pain of being hard-up and frugal in such a flashy, freewheeling place; the necessity to succeed, to achieve something and get out, to prove himself worthy of his mother, and to redeem her belief in him — these aspects formed him. It’s an American story, but in Hot Springs it is gaudier than most. Clinton was transformed by his upbringing, yet he was, like many white Southerners, a late convert to vocally demanding integration. In My Life he extols the diversity of the Hot Springs population — Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Italians — but the black side of town, the Langston neighborhood, is not mentioned; black life does not exist for him; he apparently has no black friends.

In his autobiography, Clinton continually makes the point that he was a keeper of secrets, leading a double life, never letting on in school of the turmoil at home. The succession of houses he grew up in (now all privately owned and unwelcoming) were in modest but respectable white neighborhoods. But a visit to Hot Springs is convincing proof that throughout his early life, as a young boy, as an older student, Clinton was performing a balancing act, keeping his head up while tiptoeing through a mud-puddle sludge of human weakness and greed, crookedness and carnality (the survival strategy of many politicians).

His relief at leaving Hot Springs is palpable in his telling. He had chosen Georgetown University because “I wanted to be in Washington.” Yet after Georgetown, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and Yale Law School, he did what many might regard as the unthinkable: he returned to Arkansas. It was a calculated move. He was still in his twenties, it was a state he knew well, and he was implausible anywhere else. Perhaps he had a long-term plan — he doesn’t say in his book, but you can see he is driven: the desperate, do-anything-to-win drive of the man from nowhere, who seems to be hiding something (wounds, fantasies, transgressions, family secrets). He taught law for a year at Fayetteville, then ran for Congress in 1974, and lost. He became state attorney general in 1976 and governor in 1978, at the age of thirty-two — “the boy governor,” as he was known.

To his supporters, Bill Clinton was a man of immense charm who improved health care and education in Arkansas, at the same time mastering the art of consensus building, while retaining his amorous disposition. To his enemies, he was the fiddler and liar who turned the governor’s mansion into a fornicarium. He served multiple terms, totaling almost twelve years, and, still only forty-six, became president.

It was a breathless run, and he kept on running, for a second term, and afterward — he has never lived away from the public eye, has an obvious, perhaps pathological aversion to solitude, has always sought attention — for the role of world statesman, global humanist, and reformer; but also plotter in the shadows, conniver in schemes, and double-talker, in a mold described by Thoreau in a skeptical essay, “Now, if anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions ... if he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.”

Hot Springs had two distinct sides, so did the Clinton household, so evidently does Clinton himself. This conflict could have made him a criminal, or disillusioned him, turned him cynical; instead it made him ambitious, adaptable, eager to please, charming, charismatic, sympathetic, and hardworking. But it also made him covert, adept at role-playing and posturing, with a hint of the huckster in everything he proposed, a teller of half-truths, and a master of secrets. Clinton’s drive to succeed was unstoppable, and it continues: his passion to lead, to be in charge, to relieve the planet’s ills, to be an explainer, a crowd pleaser, friend to the great and good (Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama), emotionally immature, and hungry for the world’s affection. “He seemed like the hungriest man I’d ever met,” a writer friend told me after accompanying the candidate on the campaign in 1992. In his autobiography, Clinton continually interrupts the narrative ·of his early life by flashing forward and describing how he learned a lesson or atoned for one lapse or another. America knows him as the great atoner, the fixer, the compromiser. The bird-dogger of chicks is also, inevitably, the most fervent sermonizer at the prayer breakfast.

Hot Springs has tried to reinvent itself as a family-friendly holiday town and destination for conventioneers. It has a look of solidity and criminal elegance, a big-city gloom and density, rare in a Southern town — the shadowy aura of a place in which many dramas have occurred, the rub of history, where a great deal of money has been spent to tempt the visitor to linger.

Horse racing and some low-level gaming persisted, as moronic pastimes rather than vices, but the present was simply seedy, college kids barhopping and late-summer tourists traipsing the streets, darting in and out of the gift shops and bars, shabbily dressed, pushing baby carriages, screaming at their children, hunting for fun in a place that seemed chilly and bleak. The barbecue joints and the occasional pageant or festival could not compete with the shootouts and the orgies of the past.

Now Hot Springs is a place wholly itself: the decaying abandoned buildings and vacant hotels on the main drag, funky motels, tacky shops, a whiff of damp motor courts on the outskirts — Southern neglect combined with Southern casualness and vulgarity, and redeemed by hospitality and self-parody. Part of the town’s good fortune is that it is just a gap in rocky cliffs, minutes from.the deep woods and lovely hills.

There is something joyless in a place advertising itself as joyful, a note of desperation in the hype. Faded glory, faded hope, faded hilarity, the weird junk shops, the air of desperation, the stink like an alcoholic’s breath or a carnival sideshow, the shallowness and obvious scheming that is part of every gambling town on earth. And, like every other boomtown, doomed to failure.

But Hot Springs had once been a vortex of energy, and it is a characteristic of the power of such libidinized places to make their residents morally blind — you could say the same about the White House. Hot Springs, destination of murderers, cheaters, and whores, produced a president, a peculiar one, morally blind on many occasions — as in 1992 when Governor Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to sign the death sentence of drooling, brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector, sending him gaga to the electric chair, so that candidate Clinton would win votes as a crime fighter. Complex and contradictory, the public man seeking redemption, mock humble in manner but lusting for glory, perpetually enlisting big companies to help him expand his brand, Clinton is the quintessential Southern huckster who does not know when to stop, and Hot Springs, the corrupted town, which advertised its waywardness, was itself Clintonesque.

Farmers on a Rainy Day

On a wet day in Fargo, just north of Brinkley, I made my way under a gray sky along muddy fields — some of them silvery with puddles and others lightly flooded — past the turnoff to the derelict town of Cotton Plant, to meet Dr. Calvin King again. As he promised, Dr. King had invited some black farmers to meet me — early risers, they had arrived before me, and some had come many miles for this meeting. We gathered around a table in a room at Dr. King’s Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, a low brick building on a Fargo dirt road. Black Angus cattle grazed where the road abruptly ended at a fenced field; they were stock from the experimental ranch, chewing at bales of damp, darkened straw.

The farmers were men in overalls and feed caps, the oldest in his late seventies, the youngest twenty-three. A woman sat at a side table, appearing to take notes. Two other women, both of them farmers, had been invited, but at the last minute had other obligations. They were silent, watchful, patient men, somewhat ill at ease among the bare tables and many spare chairs in the conference room. Farmers are not a sedentary lot, and these men seemed restless and out of place.

“I’m a stranger,” I said, to introduce myself. “I’ve traveled and written about many foreign countries, but I realized I hadn’t spent much time in the Southern states, where many of the problems are the same as in the so-called Third World.”

I went on in this vein, explaining that I was traveling through the Deep South, trying to understand what I saw. I thanked Dr. King for arranging this session and said I was grateful to these workingmen for meeting me on a weekday morning, a helpful turnout.

“It’s the weather,” one of them said. “It’s too wet to do anything on the farm. If this had been a sunny day, you wouldn’t have seen any of us. Our fields is flooded.”

“And we already done our chores this morning,” another said, and laughed with the others.

They were resigned to the realities of Mother Nature and human nature, but they were anything but passive and fatalistic. As I was to find, their willingness to work, to plant, to harvest, to repay loans, made them self-sufficient and gave them dignity.

They laughed again and introduced themselves. The first man who had spoken was Andre Peer, who was forty-two and had been farming for twelve years. He now had four thousand acres under cultivation, near where he lived, about forty miles away, outside Lexa, in Phillips County. He was a stocky, well-built man of medium height, forthright in gesture and word, who looked me in the eye and spoke his mind. The best educated of this group, Andre had earned a degree in agriculture in 1995 from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He grew wheat, corn, grain sorghum, and soybeans. I later learned that he had made such a success of his farm, he and his wife and son had been named Phillips County Young Farming Family of the Year in 2013, with a profile in the Helena World.

“But it’s always a struggle,” Andre said, and placed his muscular farmer’s hands against his head and squeezed hard. “You got to hear about the banking.”

“That’s a mighty big subject,” Ernest Cox said. He was a slender, mild-mannered, and sinewy man in his late sixties, weather-beaten from a life of farming — he’d worked in the fields since boyhood, on his father’s acres. He had an attractive and disarming habit of smiling and nodding even when he was speaking about something unpleasant, such as debt or financial obstacles or the hurdles at the loan office. He ran a large third-generation farming business with his brothers, Herschel and Earmer, on five thousand acres. This family farm — soybeans, wheat, and the grain sorghum known as milo — was just outside the small town of Marvell, also in Phillips County.

All these men — family farmers — lived and raised their crops in the Arkansas Delta, in communities ten miles or less from the Mississippi River, and near the river town of Helena, where their crops were loaded, to be barged downriver. Talking to them, I remembered Reverend Lyles in Alabama telling me how his father had been advised by a white man not to sell any of his land to a white person. “Sell to blacks,” he’d said, because that was the only way a black man could get a foothold in a rural area.

“I’ve got views on the banking,” Samuel Ross said. In his late seventies, he was the oldest of the group. “But I’m retired. I’ll let the others speak.” And that was all he said for an hour, though he was an attentive listener.

“Me, I’ve just started, sort of,” Roger Smith said. He was twenty-three, yet was in his fourth season farming. He’d begun as a smallholder at the age of nineteen, leased a few hundred more acres each succeeding year, and now had seven hundred acres in rice and milo. He was soft-spoken and shy, with a drawl so heavy and such a sideways reflex of talking that many times I had to ask him to repeat himself, and even then had to mentally translate what he said.

“And that’s Rickey Bone,” Dr. King said, introducing another older man. “He’s the only one here not planting row crops.”

“My wife and I are growing produce,” Rickey Bone said. “She’s really the one who should be here. Mary’s a ball of fire.”

“For these men the problem is access to capital,” Dr. King said. He was a farmer too, as he had told me before. And although he had an authoritative, almost scholarly way of speaking, he was fluent in enumerating the issues. He ran the Arkansas Land and Farm organization, so he was used to conferences and workshops and committees. “It’s imbalance,” he went on, “and it’s the problem of expanding impoverishment. Listen, I had a friend said she was going to South Africa. I asked why. She told me about the need. I said to her, ‘You don’t have to go to South Africa to find the need: She was from Little Rock. I said, ‘What about our need?’ She said, ‘I don’t think it’s the same. In South Africa it’s water quality issues: I said, ‘I can tell you about water quality issues right here!’”

I said, “I started traveling in the South for that very reason, because I saw so many outsiders committed to solving Africa’s problems. They were the same problems that exist here — poor housing, poor access to health care and education. Child hunger. Illiteracy.”

“And the banking,” Andre Peer said, tapping his thick fingers on the table. His tapping was insistent, but he also had a way of widening his eyes to express impatience.

“Banking is a white monopoly in Arkansas — it’s white controlled,” Dr. King said. “Traditional banks lend on the basis of a hundred and twenty percent credit security. Think of that. And there are serious problems of imbalance at the USDA.”

“We need operating loans,” Ernest Cox said. “Every year we have to go to the bank. We’re doing all right — I’m farming with my brothers. But we’re at the mercy of the merchants.”

“Thing you got to understand,” Andre said, and thought a moment before he proceeded. “Bankers give other farmers more.”

“What other farmers?” I asked.

Andre widened his eyes and blew out his cheeks but said nothing.

“You can speak plainly to Mr. Paul,” Dr. King said.

“By ‘other’ I mean white,” Andre said. He told a story about a loan he had sought.

It was then that I realized what these men were up against, because the loans — for machinery, for seed, for infrastructure — were considerable, in the many hundreds of thousands.

“She let me have $442,000,” Andre was saying. “It was a bad, disastrous year — 2006 into 2007 — drought and excessive heat. My harvest was poor. I asked her not to turn me in to the USDA to file a loss claim. I didn’t want to be in default. I knew I could make good on it. I know how to work. I wanted to pay what I owed. I needed time. And I did pay — every dollar.” He thought a moment, then said, “White folks say we lazy. All we want is opportunity. We willing to work.”

“These guys are surviving against the odds,” Dr. King said.

“If you’re in a bind, in serious default, white farmers want to buy your land,” Andre said. “They’re just waiting for you to fail. They’re on one side, bankers on the other. My bankers are all right, but I have to explain a lot to them to get them to understand my situation. There are no black loan officers. It’s not talked about, it’s not written about. There’s none.”

“Loan officers,” Ernest Cox said in a knowing voice, smiling, nodding, adjusting his cap.

“Another loan officer,” Andre said. “We just talking, talking about people. I said, ‘Would you give that man a loan?’ He says, ‘No.’ I say, ‘But you don’t know him.’ He says, ‘How can he buy all that equipment? Must be selling drugs.’ He thinking, ‘How he able to do that, ’cause black people don’t do that.’ The same ones talking like that are the ones sitting on the banking boards.”

“Arkansas is not like other places,” Roger Smith said in his drawl, and turned aside, as though he’d surprised himself by offering an opinion. He was shy and oblique, but he was not timid.

“The Klan don’t wear sheets,” Andre said, and looked around at his fellow farmers. “They sitting behind the desks in the banks. Uh-huh!”

“The South gives indications of being afraid of the Negro. I do not mean physical fear,” Frank Tannenbaum wrote ninety years ago in Darker Phases of the South. “It is not a matter of cowardice or bravery; it is something deeper and more fundamental. It is a fear of losing grip upon the world. It is an unconscious fear of changing status.”

Roger said, “Harrison. That town — it’s a Klan hotbed.”

It was not by chance that this remark was dropped into the conversation. Allusions to the Klan, to the past, to the insecurity that Southern blacks face especially in rural areas, I found to be common, for the Klan was the historical nightmare, the arch-destroyer, relentless and reckless, with connections in high places. Harrison is an Ozark community, the seat of Boone County, in the center of the northern edge of the state, where it lies flat against Missouri. Its decent citizens, of whom there were presumably many, hadn’t made any headlines, but its cranks were infamous.

Roger said, “Harrison has a big billboard advertising the Klan.”

“Oh, God, Harrison” was a murmur in the room.

The farmers talked generally about the miseries and abuses of Harrison, and then Ernest said, “You don’t have to go all the way to Harrison to find this business. Moro does not have a black family.”

Moro was a crossroads in nearby Lee County, with fewer than three hundred people.

“A black family moved in some years ago,” Andre said. “But they bought him out.”

“So many inequities here.” The speaker was the woman taking notes, Ramona Anderson, whom I had taken to be a recorder of the remarks in the meeting. But she was a staff member of the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, and up to now had been sitting quietly over her notebook.

She told a story about the strange history of Cotton Plant, a town just north of Brinkley. “A man came in the 1960s and saw a bird — not the ivory-bill woodpecker that everyone talks about, but another rare one. He was the only man who saw it. The result was that town authorities set aside many acres for that bird. They used eminent domain to get black farmers off the land around Cotton Plant.”

“This was done maliciously,” Dr. King said. “No one wants to talk about inequities in race around here. Brinkley has a majority black population but has never had a black mayor. This is not talked about.”

“Cotton Plant was once an important town,” Ramona said. “It’s now small and poor.”

“The big landowners don’t want schools and hospitals,” Dr. King said. “Marianna Hospital closed in 1980. It has never reopened. DeWitt is just the same size, but it has a hospital. DeWitt is majority white. They don’t want educated blacks, they want blacks driving their tractors.”

This again put me in mind of the white farmer James Agee mentioned in his survey Cotton Tenants in 1937: “I don’t object to nigrah education, not up through foath a fift grade maybe, but not furdern dat.” Rural Lee County, where Dr. King lived and farmed, had one of the highest rates of illiteracy in Arkansas (and the nation).

“Public education continues to deteriorate,” Dr. King said.

“Economic development has no color,” Ramona Anderson said. “But they manipulated the minorities. Instead of a Delta-wide initiative, they control each portion by dividing them. A true community development plan would benefit the poor, and that’s not something they want.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

“The powers that be,” she said. “Instead of a big hospital, they put in a clinic. You think that’s all right? But in a true community development plan it would be a big hospital rather than a clinic here and a clinic there.”

“People have forgotten about the farmer,” Andre said. “We are producing food for people to eat. We are creating exports. How about rice? Our rice is exported. It’s seven dollars a bushel — the price is up. Our production is increasing.” All true, I found. The National Farmers Union reported a massive increase in rice growing in the United States, and that exports were going to China, Africa, and the Middle East. Andre went on, “But all the while it’s a struggle. We’re fighting the good ole boy.” He clutched his head again and said, “Keep Pigford in mind and class action.”

“Pigford” was a word I heard from other black farmers. It was shorthand for a court case that related to some of what these men were telling me about the racial inequities in the farming business. Pigford vs. Glickman was a class action lawsuit brought in 1997 by Timothy Pigford, a black farmer from North Carolina, and four hundred others, against the Department of Agriculture (and its secretary, Dan Glickman), seeking redress for the routine denial of loans to black farmers, whom the USDA had discriminated against, thus leading to a sharp reduction in their numbers.

Although a settlement was approved in 1999, and more than a billion dollars had been paid so far by the government (under both the Bush and Obama administrations), serious allegations of fraudulent claims have been made, and there was proof of connivance by profiteering lawyers and politicians, scammers and “race hustlers.” If you look into the details of this tangled case, it is obvious that a trough was provided for the benefit of many worthy farmers (successful claimants got $50,000 apiece) as well as for the snouts of many opportunists. Yet black land loss was reversed, and after years of decline, the number of black farmers and black landowners had grown in the South and elsewhere.

“But we’re still struggling with the banks,” Andre said. “We’re still struggling with the good ole boys. After all these years we still have to prove ourselves.”

I said, “Bill Clinton spends a lot of time in Africa and India. Couldn’t he do something here to help?”

“If Clinton came here,” Andre said, “the good ole boys would say, ‘Why you coming here? Why you want to change things?’” He looked around the room for approval, and got the nods he expected. “That’s why he doesn’t do it.”

All this time, in all this talk, I could sense the men were restless. As farmers, habituated to digging, to fetching and carrying, loading trucks, repairing machines, tramping the margins of their fields, they were unused to sitting indoors for such a length of time. They were too polite to object but still seemed uncomfortable, hitching forward, clasping their hands, squirming on the plastic chair seats.

I went on asking them about their farming operations, until finally, one of them — probably Andre, because he was the most frank of the group — stood up and said, “You won’t learn much here from us talking. We have to show you, if you have the time.”

I said, “I have all the time in the world. I’d love to see your farms.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Dr. King said, as he’d said to me before. Then he took me aside and said, “When you look at the Delta, do you see businesses owned by blacks, operated by blacks? In manufacturing? In retail?” He smiled, because the obvious answer was: very few. He went on, “Compare that to the black farmers here, who are part of a multibillion-dollar business.”

Rare earths and wind turbines: Yes, it’s a problem

Despite wind industry lobbyists and apologists asserting otherwise, rare earth metals, particularly neodymium, are indeed extensively used in wind turbine magnets. (And then there’s lithium for the batteries in electric vehicles and grid storage facilities.*)

‘Permanent magnet machines feature higher efficiencies than machines with excitation windings (absence of field winding losses), less weight and the advantage of having no slip-rings and brushes. Machines above kilowatt range (and most below) employ high-specific energy density PM material, preferably of neodymium-iron-boron (Nd-Fe-B).’ —Wind Energy Systems for Electric Power Generation, by Manfred Stiebler, Springer, 2008

‘The data suggest that, with the possible exception of rare-earth elements, there should not be a shortage of the principal materials required for electricity generation from wind energy. ... Sintered ceramic magnets and rare-earth magnets are the two types of permanent magnets used in wind turbines. Sintered ceramic magnets, comprising iron oxide (ferrite) and barium or strontium carbonate, have a lower cost but generate a lower energy product than do rare-earth permanent magnets comprising neodymium, iron, and boron (Nd-Fe-B). The energy-conversion efficiency of sintered Nd-Fe-B is roughly 10 times that of sintered ferrite ... As global requirements for rare-earth elements continue to grow, any sustained increase in demand for neodymium oxide from the wind resource sector would have to be met by increased supply through expansion of existing production or the development of new mines. ... An assessment of available data suggests that wind turbines that use rare earth permanent magnets comprising neodymium, iron, and boron require about 216 kg [476 lb] of neodymium per megawatt of capacity, or about 251 kg [553 lb] of neodymium oxide (Nd₂O₃) per megawatt of capacity.’ —Wind Energy in the United States and Materials Required for the Land-Based Wind Turbine Industry From 2010 Through 2030, by U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior, Scientific Investigations Report 2011–5036

‘Five rare earth elements (REEs)—dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and yttrium—were found to be critical in the short term (present–2015). These five REEs are used in magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicles or phosphors in energy-efficient lighting. ... Permanent magnets (PMs) containing neodymium and dysprosium are used in wind turbine generators and electric vehicle (EV) motors. These REEs have highly valued magnetic and thermal properties. Manufacturers of both technologies are currently making decisions on future system design, trading off the performance benefits of neodymium and dysprosium against vulnerability to potential supply shortages. For example, wind turbine manufacturers are deciding among gear-driven, hybrid and direct-drive systems, with varying levels of rare earth content. ... Neodymium-iron-boron rare earth PMs are used in wind turbines and traction (i.e., propulsion) motors for EVs. ... the use of rare earth PMs in these applications is growing due to the significant performance benefits PMs provide ... Larger turbines are more likely to use rare earth PMs, which can dramatically reduce the size and weight of the generator compared to non-PM designs such as induction or synchronous generators. ... Despite their advantages, slow-speed turbines require larger PMs for a given power rating, translating into greater rare earth content. Arnold Magnetics estimates that direct-drive turbines require 600 kg [1,323 lb] of PM material per megawatt, which translates to several hundred kilograms of rare earth content per megawatt.’ — Critical Materials Strategy, by U.S. Department of Energy, December 2011

‘In the broader literature ..., concerns have been raised about future shortage of supply of neodymium, a metal belonging to the group of rare-earth elements that is increasingly employed in permanent magnets in wind turbine generators.’ —Assessing the life cycle environmental impacts of wind power: a review of present knowledge and research needs, by Anders Arvesen and Edgar G. Hertwich, 2012, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16(8): 5994-6006.

‘A single 3MW [direct-drive] wind turbine needs ... 2 tons of rare earth elements.’ —Northwest Mining Association

Also see:

• Rare earths, minerals used in windpower technology, could fall into short supply, Windpower Engineering & Development, June 4, 2013
• Wind turbine & generator magnets, First4Magnets (‘In every wind turbine and generator you will find one or more incredibly strong magnets. Simplified, the rotating shaft of a wind turbine is connected to one or more strong magnets, usually neodymium magnets, these magnets turn relative to an assembly of coiled wire, generating voltage in the coil.’)
• Neodymium magnets in wind turbines & generators, Stanford Magnets

And:

• Clean energy's dirty little secret, The Atlantic, May 2009
• Are rare earth minerals too costly for environment?, PBS News Hour, December 14, 2009
• In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale, Daily Mail, January 26, 2011
• Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages, The Guardian, August 7, 2012
• Rare earth mining in China: the bleak social and environmental costs, The Guardian, March 20, 2014
• Rare earths: Elemental needs of the clean-energy economy, Scientific American, October 13, 2010 (‘A massive wind turbine—capable of turning the breeze into two million watts of power—has 40-meter-long blades made from fiberglass, towers 90 meters above the ground, weighs hundreds of metric tons, and fundamentally relies on roughly 300 kilograms of a soft, silvery metal known as neodymium—a so-called rare earth. This element forms the basis for the magnets used in the turbines. "Large permanent magnets make the generators feasible," explains materials scientist Alex King, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Iowa, which started making rare earth magnets in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project. The stronger the magnets are, the more powerful the generator—and rare earth elements such as neodymium form the basis for the most powerful permanent magnets around.’)
• The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust, BBC, April 2, 2015
• The dark side of renewable energy, Earth Journalism Network, August 25, 2016
• Poison wind, Today Tonight Adelaide, March 1, 2017 (‘Clarification: This story contains details of toxic pollution associated with the use of rare earths in the production of wind turbines, cars and household electronic items. We wish to clarify that the wind industry estimates one in five turbines in South Australia use rare earths. South Australia has approximately 40 wind farms operating or seeking approval, with almost 700 individual turbines. Using the industry’s figures, South Australia has in excess of 100 turbines which use rare earths, which is a very significant number.’)
• The big eco dilemma: How rare earth metals have become a thorn in the side of the green agenda, RT, July 31, 2021
• New evidence shows massive and rapid expansion of illicit rare earths industry in Myanmar, fuelling human rights abuses, environmental destruction and funding military-linked militias, Global Witness, August 9, 2022

*Lithium: “Industry experts expect demand for lithium from U.S. car manufacturers to increase tenfold by 2030. By then, they predict the U.S. will need 300,000 metric tons of lithium per year to make green vehicles and a wealth of electronic appliances. … But environmentalists note that it would create hundreds of millions of cubic yards of rock waste, and that next to the pit would be an “acid plant” using sulfuric acid — 5,800 tons daily — to process lithium. According to an environmental impact statement from the federal Bureau of Land Management, the mine would be an open pit 2.3 miles long, a mile wide and almost 400 feet deep … the mine would use about 3,000 gallons of water per minute.” —The cost of green energy: The nation’s biggest lithium mine may be going up on a site sacred to Native Americans, NBC News, August 11, 2022

Letter in support of proposed wind turbine sound rules

To the Clerk of the Vermont Public Service Board:

I support the proposed wind turbine sound rules as a first step to protect the aural environment of our mountains.

As you know, a quiet rural night in Vermont is likely to have a sound level of only 25 dBA or even less. An increase in ambient noise of 5 dB is recognized as a cause of widespread complaints. So limiting the sound level at night to 35 dBA is not severe but actually rather lenient.

The proposed rule does not address low-frequency noise, which Denmark (the world's leader in wind energy technology and implementation) since 2011 has limited to 20 dBA indoors (10-160 Hz).

Infrasound (which is not heard but instead felt) is also a concern, with many acoustic engineers determining that a C-weighted indoor limit of 50 dB is necessary to protect health.

Nor does the proposed rule address amplitude modulation, the distinct "swish" or "thump" of large wind turbines. In the UK, planning permission for the Den Brook project included a rule to limit amplitude modulation: A 125-ms pulse of 3 dBA or greater (3 dB being the difference in noise level detectable by the human ear) can not occur in any 2-second period five or more times in six or more minutes of any hour, when those minute-long average noise levels are 28 dBA or more.

While these limits, as well as the proposed setback of 10 times the total height from residences (which should be at least 15 times the height, and from property lines, so that people can enjoy all of their property), begin to protect human neighbors, they do nothing to protect the wildlife of the mountains, who in most cases are much more sensitive to sound than humans.

[See also:  Proposal and comments for implementing a rule regarding sound from wind generation projects, by Stephen Ambrose]

Notes and comments from the recent campaign and election

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

‘Not Our President’

A friend wrote to another friend:

These protesters are beyond pathetic. I’d have some respect for them if they’d all been out there at some point during the last eight years of Obama’s tenure, while he steadily expanded Bush’s wars, pondered his Tuesday “kill list”, deliberately droned countless numbers of people to death (and still is), including Americans, one a 16 year old child, looked the other way while Israel stole land and butchered and imprisoned thousands of helpless Palestinians, many of them children, and then he just sent Israel another 38 billion of US taxpayer money as a reward. He rabidly pursued, persecuted and prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined, sits by while Chelsea Manning tries to kill herself and is thrown into solitary confinement, forced Assange to be a prisoner in the Ecuadorean embassy, forced Snowden to take refuge in Russia – these three are all an example of true heroism, yet are treated as dangerous pariahs by Obama. He increased arms sales to the most volatile areas of the world, passed out major weaponry to terrorists, promoted bloody coups leading to horrific death and destruction not to mention the creation of ISIS and terrorist havens in Libya, and Syria, and then there’s the mess in Honduras and Ukraine and the wildly irresponsible threats to Russia.

He never prosecuted the bankers responsible for destroying countless lives and creating misery and mayhem here and over the entire world. His first official visitor to the White House eight years ago was none other than Goldman Sachs itself, Lloyd Blankfein, and we now know, thanks to Wikileaks, that his cabinet was chosen by the banking industry. Then there’s his promoting fracking, oil drilling in pristine areas, pipelines, nuclear, Monsanto, etc etc.

And while he busied himself with this crap, he totally ignored the plight of the people he was elected to serve, many in desperate straits – Americans lost jobs hand over fist, rural areas left to fester and rot, descending into hopelessness, decrepitude and massive drug addiction, while the sneering urban Democrats mocked and blamed them for their own misery. Then there are the forgotten cities, Detroit, Flint, etc ... the rust belt areas still out there dying, the country’s infrastructure falling to bits, the US looks increasingly third world outside of the posher areas. Obama sold us down the river to the health insurance scammers, forcing people to buy that crap or else, now it’s an unaffordable mess for most people, he never even tried for a public option let alone single payer. He formed the infamous Simpson-Bowles “catfood commission” to try to cut Social Security and raise the age of eligibility. Under Obama, there’s been no cost of living increase for those living on SS. He refused to support unions when he had the chance. He never addressed the outrageous costs of college. A record number of abortion clinics closed down while he was president and he never said anything about it, never made a speech when the courageous Dr Tiller was murdered. So much for having a “pro-choice” president. Then there’s his insane promotion of the TPP, which gives corporations total power – fascism in its purest form. if that passes, it will be a disaster for the entire planet. He chose a corporatist as a replacement for Scalia, one who supports Citizens United! While Obama and Michelle hosted endless glamorous soirees with vulgarian rich celebrities, people were going hungry, sleeping on the streets, losing everything they had. Jobs went to H1B1 workers imported from India, etc, and more factories shut down and moved out of the country, leaving millions without any other avenue to employment. Gun violence increased horrifically. He hasn’t stood with the Native American nations who are courageously facing down the militarized police to protect our water. Quite the legacy! He’s a smooth con artist and a coward. Hillary Clinton ran on this record, believes in all of it, and would have continued all of the above, but even more so. But that was good enough for her fan club.

So during Obama’s time, here were no major protests, and no anti-war movement during the last eight years, it disappeared as soon as Bush left office. Invasions of other countries for corporate profits is just fine when a Democrat president is doing it, apparently. Imperialism and fascism is no longer a problem.

Now these dolts who think they’re the center of the universe are out protesting Trump, who hasn’t even done anything yet. They are enraged because Clinton, a criminal and a warmonger far worse than Obama, didn’t win. Clinton is just a dull neocon hack out of her depth, who has been relentlessly over-promoted and given everything on a silver platter due to her being married to Bill Clinton – and yet every task she has been given has been almost unbelievably bungled, resulting in the deaths and displacement of millions of people. Everything Clinton stood for was poison, yet these people are upset that they aren’t going to get Henry Kissinger/Margaret Thatcher/Attila the Hun in an ugly pantsuit? They should be relieved. There were no big protests when Bernie was cheated out of the primaries by the DNC and Hillary Clinton, interestingly. These people represent neoliberalism on steroids, fascism is fine with them as long as they remain the fortunate ones. The Democrat party stands for raw corporate power, nothing more, just as does the Republican party – though the Repubs are more democratic than the democrats.

Bernie would be the president-elect now if not for Clinton’s cheating him out of what was rightfully his. That’s what enraging. It’s just kind of tragic that he capitulated to her and lost his credibility in promoting the vile Clinton, instead of taking the opportunity to help Jill Stein and using all of that anti-establishment energy out there to promote a real third party. So despite all of the establishment’s heavy lifting for Clinton, the MSM debasing itself for her, her Hollywood celebrities, billions spent, cheating and lying, none of it worked. That’s cause for celebration, one would think – the “little” people, whether Trump or third party voters, fought back and won. They made people take notice of them.

Who knows what Trump will do; it could be okay or awful – let’s hope for the best, anyway. The time for protests may well be coming, but doing it now just seems like a spoiled-brat, sore loser temper tantrum. It’s just a dream come true that with Clinton out, we’ve (hopefully) seen the last of that greedy, destructive family and World War 3 was averted.

Delicious to see her smug fans so shocked and in meltdown – how dare anyone defy them?! Amazing the MSM and her supporters are so in a bubble they never saw this coming – Trump always had a good chance of winning, but they never believed it, because they live in an echo chamber, sneering at their less fortunate fellow Americans, who they somehow imagined couldn’t find their way to the polling stations. A much-deserved comeuppance for these people who smeared Bernie supporters, third-party supporters, and now Trump supporters as being somehow less than human. It’s understandable that people are worried about Trump; but the reaction by Clinton cultists is way over the top. They have learned nothing ...

Excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street firms and other corporatist insiders

The 80-page attachment in the Podesta emails of Clinton's Wall St speech excerpts is at https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails//fileid/927/180 [Note: The page numbers in the Table of Contents of the attachment (a Word file) are not all accurate.] Update: Three complete transcripts are now available as Word file attachments at https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11011

‘Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth over the course of the last 30 years’ p16

‘capture of oil and gas … from hydraulic fracturing … has created this enormous opportunity for us’ p20

‘with the new discoveries, with the new techniques for extracting oil and gas, the US & Canada are going to be powerhouses …’ p21

‘I am an all-in kind of person, all-of-the-above kind of person when it comes to America's energy and environmental future’ p24

‘I'm all for privacy, believe me.’ p26

‘the collection of the metadata is something that has proven to be very useful’ p28

‘You know, on healthcare we are the prisoner of our past. The way we got to develop any kind of medical insurance program was during World War II when companies facing shortages of workers began to offer healthcare benefits as an inducement for employment. So from the early 1940s healthcare was seen as a privilege connected to employment. And after the war when soldiers came back and went back into the market there was a lot of competition, because the economy was so heated up. So that model continued. And then of course our large labor unions bargained for healthcare with the employers that their members worked for. So from the early 1940s until the early 1960s we did not have any Medicare, or our program for the poor called Medicaid until President Johnson was able to get both passed in 1965. So the employer model continued as the primary means by which working people got health insurance. People over 65 were eligible for Medicare. Medicaid, which was a partnership, a funding partnership between the federal government and state governments, provided some, but by no means all poor people with access to healthcare. So what we've been struggling with certainly Harry Truman, then Johnson was successful on Medicare and Medicaid, but didn't touch the employer based system, then actually Richard Nixon made a proposal that didn't go anywhere, but was quite far reaching. Then with my husband's administration we worked very hard to come up with a system, but we were very much constricted by the political realities that if you had your insurance from your employer you were reluctant to try anything else. And so we were trying to build a universal system around the employer-based system. And indeed now with President Obama's legislative success in getting the Affordable Care Act passed that is what we've done. We still have primarily an employer-based system, but we now have people able to get subsidized insurance. So we have health insurance companies playing a major role in the provision of healthcare, both to the employed whose employers provide health insurance, and to those who are working but on their own are not able to afford it and their employers either don't provide it, or don't provide it at an affordable price. We are still struggling. We've made a lot of progress. Ten million Americans now have insurance who didn't have it before the Affordable Care Act, and that is a great step forward. (Applause.) And what we're going to have to continue to do is monitor what the costs are and watch closely to see whether employers drop more people from insurance so that they go into what we call the health exchange system. So we're really just at the beginning. But we do have Medicare for people over 65. And you couldn't, I don't think, take it away if you tried, because people are very satisfied with it, but we also have a lot of political and financial resistance to expanding that system to more people. So we're in a learning period as we move forward with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. And I'm hoping that whatever the shortfalls or the glitches have been, which in a big piece of legislation you're going to have, those will be remedied and we can really take a hard look at what's succeeding, fix what isn't, and keep moving forward to get to affordable universal healthcare coverage like you have here in Canada.’ [Clinton Speech For tinePublic – Saskatoon, CA, 1/21/15]
[cf Clinton campaign rally at Grand View University – Des Moines, IA, 1/29/16: angrily characterizing Bernie Sanders’ plan to pursue single-payer health insurance as ‘some better idea that will never, ever come to pass.’]

‘we’re still living in too uncertain a world to make radical changes right now’ p40
[translation: this is precisely when radical change is possible and why we must be vigilant to prevent it]

‘So if you look at a recent study that just actually was posted today, if you're in the middle class in Canada, you're better off in general than if you're in the middle class in the United States today. And if you're poorer in the United States, you are worse off than the poor in Canada and Europe. […] So yeah, we've done some very necessary and good things but we've also, in my view, not adequately addressed the challenges that have come in the last 20, 25 years. They've slowly crept up on us like all of us are the frogs in the giant pot and the heat's been slowly turned up and we haven't jumped out, and if we even started to thinking about it, we weren't sure what we'd find if we did. So we're all wondering around saying, what's going on, why is it happening? And it has certainly economic effects because as people's standard of living stalls, if they believe that their children are not going to be better off -- and remember, ever since we have done polling in this country, back to the Great Depression, no matter how poor the vast majority of Americans were, they believed it would be better in the future and they believed it would be better for their children. That no longer is the case. People are quite concerned that their livelihoods, their lives are not going to get any better, and they're even now worried that neither will their children. So this deserves the kind of thoughtful discussion, not the us versus them, finger pointing, blame placing, because that's not going to get us anywhere, but if we do not address and figure out how we're going to revitalize the middle class and begin the process of once again encouraging more people to rise up, then what I fear is that our politics and our social fabric are going to be dramatically altered.’ [Clinton Speech For JP Morgan, 4/22/14]

‘… there are rich people everywhere. And there are poor people everywhere’ p44

Clinton's remarks on Iran are creepy & unhinged. p44-46

‘the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’ p47

legalization of pot?
CLINTON: Short [ie, I don’t support] in all senses of the word
p48

Clinton praises Wal-Mart as model for politics p52

‘we are in a worse position than we were in the 90s’ p53

BLANKFEIN: … the financial services industry has been the one unifying theme that binds everybody [R/D] together in common. p54
[cf Huey Long (1932): ‘They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.’

Clinton endorsed recommendations of Obama's Simpson-Bowles “cat-food commission”, which included cuts to Social Security. p63-65

‘So we now have what everybody warned we would have, and I am very concerned about the spillover effects. And there is still an argument that goes on inside the administration and inside our friends at NATO and the Europeans. How do intervene—my view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene. We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can’t help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we’re doing and I want credit for it, and all the rest of it’ [Speech to Goldman Sachs, 2013 IBD Ceo Annual Conference, 6/4/13]

‘To have a no fly zone … you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians’ p67

‘And with political people, again, I would say the same thing, you know, there was a lot of complaining about Dodd-Frank, but there was also a need to do something because for political reasons, if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing, but what you do is really important. And I think the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort through it all.’ [Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments Symposium, 10/24/13]

‘Sam Walton was a cheerleader for Walmart but also a great patriot, because he knew that he was able to build this company in this country, and it might not, if ever, have been possible anywhere else.’ [Hillary Clinton remarks at Sanford Bernstein, 5/29/13]