Please Support EnviroVideo. Your Help Would Be So Appreciated!

Please consider supporting EnviroVideo, the non-profit through which I host Enviro Close-Up on Free Speech TV. Go to www.envirovideo.com to make a tax-deductible contribution. We provide critical information found nowhere else on TV. Enviro Close-Up is aired on 177 cable systems in 40 states and the DISH and DIRECTV satellite networks, and is broadcast globally online. EnviroVideo also produces news shows, specials and documentaries which I host. Our motto is: “Too Hot For TV!” Thanks!

The Political TV Commercial as a Pivotal Component in American Presidential Politics and National Leadership by Q Score

            Ever since Madison Avenue advertising man Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower to use him and TV commercials to run for the presidency in 1952, the political TV commercial has become a pivotal component in American presidential politics.

Four years earlier Reeves tried to interest the then Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, in the approach. But Dewey “did not buy the idea of lowering himself to the commercial environment of a toothpaste ad,” related Robert Spero in his 1980 book The Duping of the American Voter, Dishonesty & Deception in Presidential Television Advertising.

The Eisenhower commercials were coordinated with the campaign’s slogan—“I Like Ike.” 

Indeed, one spot featured a song especially written by Irving Berlin titled “I Like Ike.”  

            There was an early understanding by Reeves that television best communicates feeling and emotion, not information. TV, as media theorists later described it, is a “non-cognitive medium.” Thus the Eisenhower ads—stressing Eisenhower’s likeability – involved feeling and emotion, making the strongest use of the TV medium.

I recall, as a kid, seeing the TV image of Eisenhower back then, grinning.

The intellectual Democrat candidate, Adlai Stevenson, tried to counter the blitz of 15-second Eisenhower spots. Stevenson embarked on a series of half-hour TV presentations, reiterating and expanding on themes he struck in his convention acceptance speech. These lectures, essentially, didn’t work.

With television, as Joe McGinniss wrote in his seminal 1969 The Selling of the President, “it matters less” that a politician “does not have ideas. His personality is what the viewers want to share. The TV candidate...is measured...not against a standard of performance established by two centuries of democracy—but against Mike Douglas. How well does he handle himself? Does he mumble, does he twitch, does he make me laugh?  Do I feel warm inside? Style becomes substance. The medium is the massage and the masseur gets the votes.”

            TV talk show personality Mike Douglas is dead. But the dynamic McGinniss described continues—indeed has expanded politically.

As observed Richard Reeves in a 1980 television report,  “ABC News Closeup: Lights, Cameras...Politics,” realizing TV “transmits feelings and emotion better than it transmits information...media consultants tried to motivate Americans to vote the same way that they were motivated to buy toothpaste: with little entertainments.”

He cited as an early example of this the infamous spot put together in 1964 by Tony Schwartz for Lyndon Johnson.  A little girl plucks petals from a daisy, counting up to nine and then a man’s voice counts down from ten to zero—and suddenly the TV screen fills with the super-scary footage of a hydrogen bomb, and Johnson’s voice states: “The stakes are too high...We must either love each other or we must die.”

Schwartz later wrote in his book The Responsive Chord: “The task of a media specialist is not to reveal a candidate’s stand on issues, so much as to help communicate those personal qualities of a candidate that are likely to win votes.” This spot and the strong emotion it was designed to impart were aimed at leaving the viewer feeling that Lyndon Johnson was a person of responsibility, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, something else.

Further, with this spot, the TV political attack ad, the emotionally-laden negative political TV commercial, had arrived—to become a mainstay of election advertising.

 By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had become a model for TV-based presidential TV commercials—and politics.  Many voters might have disliked his policies, but a substantial number “liked” Reagan—based on the image he projected through television. 

With the ability to performing on television having become a necessary attribute of a presidential candidate, the Republican Party had chosen an actor to run for president. Reagan had been governor of California but, importantly, Reagan for eight years before that was a TV performer, host of General Electric Theatre, after his Hollywood career hit the skids.

It had come to a point at which Newsday columnist Robert Weimer declared in 1980: “Why bother with the arduous, uncertain and expensive process of casting ballots at all? Why not simply put presidential candidates into a head-to-head, prime-time competition on election night and let the ratings decide the contest....It’s not hard to understand why the candidates have settled on television as their main mode of communication. It reaches the most people with the most impact, even if it does tend to sell only gross attributes. Audience perception of a smile, for example, can determine the outcome of a presidential race...Television is essentially a medium that appeals more to spinal than cerebral receptors. The message that gets through is spare: Ronald Reagan is affable.”

We can now analyze presidential candidate after candidate through the prism of political TV commercials and television performance.

It can be very unsettling. Consider what was widely described as a great problem for Al Gore when he ran against George W. Bush in 2000: most folks would rather, it was said, go out for a beer with Bush than Gore. Gore’s persona as transmitted through TV was said to be wooden, lacking charisma, Bush somehow connected better. And we got Bush.

Our current president, Barack Obama, is a master of performing on television. As Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen complained on Politico this past February, “The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on ‘The View.’”

And today, television—and particularly political TV commercials—are vital to the rise and continuance  in office of candidates for, not just for president, but for the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, governorships, mayoral positions, and seats in state legislatures and on city councils.

A political era of dueling political TV commercials is firmly here.

Meanwhile, the notion of the “Q Score” or “Q rating” has arrived.

The term “Q Score” was coined in 1963 by Jack Landis who founded a company Marketing Evaluations, Inc. in Roslyn, N.Y. which continues to use the concept as the central measure in its opinion polling and market research work. “Q rating”—defined by Merriam-Webster as a “scale measuring the popularity of a person or thing”—is said by those dictionary people as having its “first known use” in 1977.

They mean roughly the same: they’re measures of likeability. They are the standard for how TV reporters keep their jobs these days, why TV programs are renewed, how products are promoted as well as how would-be holders of the presidency and other offices in the U.S.—and increasingly leaders in nations around the world—are selected.

The basis for “I Like Ike” is now widely applied.

And we are left to wonder what kind of “Q Score” or “Q rating” Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson might have had?  What have we lost—and what have we gained?

           

 

Island of Secrets

             Michael Carroll, author of the best-selling book, “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” was back on the East Coast, vacationing with his family, and amazed over recent developments concerning Plum Island.

Carroll, an attorney from Long Island who worked seven years on “Lab 257” which became a best-seller after its 2004 publication, has since moved to California where he and his wife, a California native, established a law practice.

Back on Long Island, where he is a native, Carroll finds as astonishing Representative Tim Bishop’s fight against the plan of the federal government to shut down its Plum Island Animal Disease Center and shift its operations to a new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility it would build in Manhattan Kansas. Bishop, of Southampton, is mainly concerned about the loss of 200 federal jobs at the center which is in his eastern Long Island Congressional district.

“It is utter foolishness to try to save 200 jobs at the price of protecting the entire region from this island and the threat it represents,” said Carroll in a recent interview. An outbreak of disease agents worked with on Plum Island—notably those affecting both animals and people—in the heavily populated area off which the island sits could be “devastating.” Plum Island is just off and midway between the New York-Boston megalopolis and its millions of people, Carroll pointed out. The 843-acre island is a mile-and-a-half off Orient Point in Southold Town on the North Fork of Long Island. Connecticut is less than 10 miles to the north.

A spokesperson for Bishop, Oliver Longwell, responded that Bishop’s “position on the island is indistinguishable from every other elected official who represents Southold Town at all levels of government.”

As to the call by a grouping of Long Island environmentalists for preservation of the island as opposed to the federal government’s consideration of having housing developed on it,  Carroll said that making the island a preserve is all that could be done with Plum Island—but, he emphasized, it will need to be a preserve closed to people. “You can’t let anybody on it,” he said.   

“The island is an environmental disaster,” said Carroll. “Every effort to decontaminate Lab 257, the1950s-era germ warfare building on it, has failed,” said Carroll. “They can’t get that building clean.” (Subsequently, a new laboratory building was constructed after the U.S. Department of Agriculture Department took control of the island from the U.S. Army,)

“There is contamination all over the island,” said Carroll. He noted that up until recent years, nothing was ever removed from the island—everything was disposed on it, much of it buried. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) have brought charges through the years in connection with the Plum Island waste, cases cited in his book, he went on. “If this was a private business, it immediately would have been shut down,” said Carroll. But only “nominal” fines were meted out.

As to a shift of Plum Island operations to Kansas, that’s “going out of the frying pan into the fire,” said Carroll. “Is there is no better place to study foreign animal diseases than in the middle of America’s farm belt?”

“What research that needs to be conducted should be done nowhere near a human population center or a food production center,” said Carroll.

As for Plum Island, “There’s no way that island can be made fit for human habitation,” declared Carroll.” The island needs to be “forsaken. It’s very sad.”

The federal government, however, believes Plum Island can be habitable as evidenced by it contemplating housing on it with the center’s closing. And real estate mogul Donald Trump has jumped into the situation by saying he would like to buy the island and, he said last month, develop a “really beautiful, world-class golf course” on it.

Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has written to the General Services Administration, which would manage the planned sale, and the Department of Homeland Security, which after the 9/11 attack took over the island from the Department of Agriculture, calling for a “comprehensive investigation” of Plum Island by the state DEC, and a clean-up plan. This would include “the need to properly close Building 257.” Discussing his letter at a recent appearance at Orient Beach State Park, Cuomo called Plum Island “the island of secrets.”

The Cuomo family is very familiar with Plum Island. Andrew’s father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, with whom Carroll worked as a lawyer in New York City, is quoted on the jacket of “Lab 257” as calling the book a “carefully researched, chilling expose of a potential catastrophe.”

Carroll’s “Lab 257” also documents a Nazi connection to the original establishment of a U.S. laboratory on Plum Island. According to the book, Erich Traub, a scientist who worked for the Third Reich doing biological warfare, was the force behind its founding.

During World War II,  “as lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island in the Baltic Sea—Traub worked for Adolph Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, on live germ trials,” states “Lab 257." The mission was to develop biological warfare to be directed against animals in the Soviet Union. This included infecting cattle and reindeer with foot-and-mouth disease.

“Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war,” says “Lab 257.”  While in the U.S. in the 1930s, too, relates the book, Traub was a member of the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund which was involved in pro-Nazi rallies held weekly in Yaphank on Long Island.

With the end of the war, Traub came back to the United States under Project Paperclip, a U.S. program under which Nazi scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, were brought to America.

“Traub’s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems” given to officials at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters, and to the CIA, “laid the groundwater for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island,” says “Lab 257.” “Traub was a founding father.” And Plum Island’s purpose, says the book, became what Insel Riems had been: to develop biological warfare to be directed against animals in the Soviet Union—now that the Cold War and conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had begun.

The Long Island daily newspaper Newsday earlier documented this biological warfare mission of Plum Island. In a lead story on November 21, 1993, Newsday investigative reporter John McDonald wrote: “A 1950s military plan to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine called for making biological warfare weapons out of exotic animal diseases at a Plum Island laboratory, now-declassified Army records reveal.” A facsimile of one of the records, dated 1951, covered the front page of that issue of Newsday.

The article went on: “Documents and interviews disclose for the first time what officials have denied for years: that the mysterious and closely guarded animal lab off the East End of Long Island was originally designed to conduct top-secret research into replicating dangerous viruses that could be used to destroy enemy livestock.”

“Lab 257” has many pages about this based on documents including many that Carroll found in the National Archives.

The book also tells of why suddenly the Army transferred Plum Island to the Department of Agriculture in 1954—the U.S. military became concerned about having to feed millions of people in the Soviet Union if it destroyed their food animals.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff “found that a war with the U.S.S.R. would best be fought with conventional and nuclear means, and biological warfare against humans—not against food animals,” says “Lab 257.” “Destroying the food supply meant having to feed millions of starving Russians after winning a war”

Still, “Lab 257” questions whether there ever was a clean break.

Officials at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center have, however, insisted over the years that the center’s function is to conduct research into foreign animal diseases not found in the U.S.—especially foot-and-mouth disease—and the only biological warfare research done is of a “defensive” kind.

“Lab 257” also maintains that there is a link between the Plum Island center and the emergence of Lyme disease. It “suddenly surfaced” 10 miles from Plum Island “in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1975.” Carroll cites years of experimentation with ticks on Plum Island and the possibility of an accidental or purposeful release.

“The tick is the perfect germ vector,” says “Lab 257,” “which is why it has long been fancied as a germ weapon by early biowarriors from Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan to the Soviet Union and the United States."

“A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s,” the book states, “recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. ‘They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks.” “Lab 257” goes on: “Dr. Traub’s World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de riguer for Erich Traub.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nuclear Power Through the Fukushima Perspective

It started this June in California. Speaking about the problems at the troubled San Onofre nuclear plants through the perspective of the Fukushima nuclear complex catastrophe was a panel of Naoto Kan, prime minister of Japan when the disaster began; Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) at the time; Peter Bradford, an NRC member when the Three Mile Island accident happened; and nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen.

This week the same panel of experts on nuclear technology—joined by long-time nuclear opponent Ralph Nader—was on the East Coast, in New York City and Boston, speaking about problems at the problem-riddled Indian Point nuclear plants near New York and the troubled Pilgrim plant near Boston, through the perspective on the Fukushima catastrophe.

Their presentations were powerful.

Kan, at the event Tuesday in Manhattan, told of how he had been a supporter of nuclear power, but after the Fukushima accident, which began on March 11, 2011, “I changed my thinking 180-degrees, completely.” He said that in the first days of the accident it looked like an “area that included Tokyo” and populated by 50 million people might have to be evacuated.

“We do have accidents such as an airplane crash and so on,” said Kan, “but no other accident or disaster” other than a nuclear plant disaster can “affect 50 million people...no other accident could cause such a tragedy.”

All 54 nuclear plants in Japan have now been closed, Kan said. And “without nuclear power plants we can absolutely provide the energy to meet our demands.” Meanwhile, in the two-plus years since the disaster began, Japan has tripled its use of solar energy—a jump in solar power production that is the equivalent of the electricity that would be produced by three nuclear plants, he said. He pointed to Germany as a model in its commitment to shutting down all its nuclear power plants and having “all its power supplied by renewable power” by 2050. The entire world, said Kan, could do this. “If humanity really would work together...we could generate all our energy through renewable energy.”

Jaczko said that the Fukushima disaster exploded several myths about nuclear power including those involving the purported prowess of U.S. nuclear technology. The General Electric technology of the Fukushima nuclear plants “came from the U.S.,” he noted. And, it exploded the myth that “severe accidents wouldn’t happen.” Said the former top nuclear official in the United States: “Severe accidents can and will happen.”

And what the Fukushima accident “is telling us is society does not accept the consequences of these accidents,” said Jaczko, who was pressured out of his position on the NRC after charging that the agency was not considering the “lessons” of the Fukushima disaster.  In monetary cost alone, Jaczko said, the cost of the Fukushima accident is estimated at $500 billion by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Nuclear engineer Gundersen, formerly a nuclear industry senior vice president, noted that the NRC “says the chance of a nuclear accident is one in a million,” that an accident would happen “every 2,500 years.” This is predicated, he said, on what the NRC terms a probabilistic  risk assessment or PRA. “I’d like to refer to it as PRAY.” The lesson of “real life,” said Gundersen, is that there have been five nuclear plant meltdowns in the past 35 years—Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and the three at Fukushima Daiichi complex. That breaks down to an accident “every seven years.”

“This is a technology that can have 40 good years that can be wiped out in one bad day,” said Gundersen. He drew a parallel between Fukushima Daiichi “120 miles from Tokyo” and the Indian Point nuclear plant complex “26 miles from New York City.” He said that “in many ways Indian Point is worse than Fukushima was before the accident.”  One element: the Fukushima accident resulted from an earthquake followed by a tsunami. The two operating plants at Indian Point are also adjacent to an earthquake fault, said Gundersen. New York City “faces one bad day like Japan, one sad day.” He also spoke of the “arrogance and hubris” of the nuclear industry and how the NRC has consistently complied with the desires of the industry.

Bradford said that that the “the bubble” that the nuclear industry once termed “the nuclear renaissance” has burst. As to a main nuclear industry claim in this promotion to revive nuclear power—that atomic energy is necessary in “mitigating climate change”—this has been shown to be false. It would take tripling of the 440 total of nuclear plants now in the world to reduce greenhouse gasses by but 10 percent. Other sources of power are here as well as energy efficiency that could combat climate change. Meanwhile, the price of electricity from any new nuclear plants built has gone to a non-competitive 12 to 20 cents per kilowatt hour while “renewables are falling in price.”

Bradford also sharply criticized the agency of which he was once a member, the NRC, charging among other things that it has in recent years discouraged citizen participation. Also, as to Fukushima, the “accident really isn’t over,” said Bradford who, in addition to his role at the NRC has chaired the utility commissions of Maine and New York State.

Nader said that with nuclear power and the radioactivity it produces “we are dealing with a silent cumulative form of violence.” He said nuclear power is “unnecessary, unsafe, and uninsurable...undemocratic.” And constructing new words that begin with “un,” it is also “unevacuatable, unfinanceable, unregulatable.”

Nader said nuclear power is unnecessary because there are many energy alternatives—led by solar and wind. It is unsafe because catastrophic accidents can and will happen. He noted how the former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in a 1960s report projected that a major nuclear accident could irradiate an area “the size of Pennsylvania.” He asked: “Is this the kind of gamble we want to take to boil water?”

Nuclear power is extremely expensive and thus uneconomic, he went on. It is uninsurable with the original scheme for nuclear power in the U.S. based on the federal Price-Anderson Act which limits a utility’s liability to a “fraction” of the cost of damages from an accident. That law remains, extended by Congress “every ten years or so.”

As for being “unevacuable,” NRC evacuation plans are “fantasy” documents,” said Nader. The U.S. advised Americans within 50 miles of Fukushima to evacuate. Some 20 million people live within 50 miles of the Indian Point plants and New Yorkers “can hardly get out” of the city during a normal rush hour.” Nuclear power is “unfinancable,” he said, depending on government fiscal support through tax dollars. And it is “unregulatable” with the NRC taking a “promotional attitude.”  And, “above all it is undemocratic,” said Nader, “a technology born in secrecy” which continues. Meanwhile, said Nader, “as the orders dry up in developed nations” for nuclear plants, the nuclear industry is pushing to build new plants in the developing world.

Also at the event in New York City, moderated by Riverkeeper President Paul Gallay and held at the 92^nd Street Y, a segment of a new video documentary on nuclear power by Adam Salkin was screened. It showed Salkin in a boat going right in front of the Indian Point plants and it taking nearly five hours for a “security” boat from the plant to respond, and Salkin, the next day, in an airplane flying as low as 500 feet above the plants. The segment demonstrated that the nuclear plants on the Hudson are an easy target for terrorists and, it noted, what it showed was what “terrorists already know.”

The San Onofre nuclear power plants were closed permanently three weeks after the June panel event—and after many years of intensive actions by nuclear opponents in California to shut down the plants, situated between San Diego and Los Angeles. The panel’s appearances this week in New York City Tuesday and Boston Wednesday, titled “Fukushima—Ongoing Lessons for New York and Boston,” are aimed at the same outcome occurring on the East Coast.

The forums are online. For links go to www.Facebook.com/FukushimaLessons

 

 

Video Slot Machines on Long Island and LIPA -- the Quid Pro Quo

            Some Long Island officials are betting that gambling will provide a big financial boost for the fiscally-pressed county governments of Nassau and Suffolk. Are they right or making a bad bet?

In June, in a surprise move, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo—after months of saying no—suddenly agreed to the call from officials of Nassau and Suffolk to allow the two counties to set up facilities for video slot machines. Each could have a facility with 1,000 video slot machines.

The Cuomo turn-around, according to well-informed sources, was linked to getting the Long Island delegation in the New York State Legislature to support his plan to turn the Long Island Power Authority into a shell and have a private New Jersey utility, Public Service Electric and Gas, be THE utility on Long Island.

Then votes on a bill expanding gambling in the state that included the video slot plan for Long Island and votes on a bill to drastically alter the utility structure on Long Island were taken in the State Assembly and State Senate—and both passed. “The governor horse-traded his support for the slots for votes to pass his LIPA bill,” said one source.

Long Island had not been included in Cuomo’s original gambling expansion bill.  Right up through early June, it would have authorized three gambling casinos and video slot machines but only upstate. “LI NOT IN GAMBLING PLAN,” was the headline of a June 6^th Newsday article. It quoted Assemblyman Phil Boyle of Bay Shore saying “he’s ‘disappointed but not deterred’ by the island’s omission in Cuomo’s plan.”

A week earlier, Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano and Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, with the presidents of the two counties’ Off-Track Betting Corporations, had gone to Albany, meeting with state legislators and “doubling down,” said Newsday, in seeking  “potentially lucrative video gaming” on Long Island. But Cuomo still felt this would take away from his desire to assist upstate through gambling.

Then, a week later, his gambling bill was expanded to allow video slot machines on Long Island and was voted upon simultaneous with Cuomo’s bill to drastically change the Long Island utility structure—which had faced stiff resistance from the Long Island delegation. The “opposition to the bill on LIPA fell apart with the addition of Long Island to the gambling plan,” said another source. “The two were linked.”

Is gambling the fiscal rescue some Long Island officials would believe? Consider the Page 1 story in the New York Times last month headlined: “Crowds Return to Las Vegas, but Gamble Less.” It told of a drop in gambling revenue with a “new influx of tourists, younger and less devoted to gambling.”

Or consider a Times piece a month earlier about gambling in decline in Atlantic City. “Revenues have fallen 40 percent since their peak in 2006 as new casinos in neighboring states have taken away gamblers,” it noted.

The video slot terminals in Nassau and Suffolk would be operated by the Nassau and Suffolk OTB Corporations—huge troughs for political patronage in both counties. And they have been in trouble. Suffolk OTB moved to declare bankruptcy last year (New York City OTB filed for bankruptcy in 2009).

The office of New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in a 2010 report titled “Financial Condition of New York State Regional Off-Track Betting Corporations” spoke of the “financial condition of the state’s five regional OTB Corporations” having “substantially deteriorated.” It said “various factors account for the significant and continuing downturn in handle including a diminished interest in horseracing” and “competition from unregulated internet gambling sites.” This “general decline” in horseracing is “demonstrated by decreased attendance at most state racetracks.”  There are not only now many casinos all over the United States diluting the gambling industry, but “government-sponsored lotteries,” too, noted the report.       

The lure of winning hundreds of millions of dollars in the Powerball lottery, owned and operated by 33 state lotteries, towers over winning the tiniest fraction of that on a video slot machine.

Meanwhile, Congressman Peter King of Seaford, whose district includes parts of both Nassau and Suffolk, introduced a bill in June that would license online gambling at the federal level, further spreading gambling choices.

Is the pot of government gold from video slot machines a mirage? I bet it is.

Fracking Fight Comes to Long Island

(My column in Long Island newspapers this week.)

            The fight over fracking has come to Long Island. Although there are no shale deposits here to exploit for gas by hydraulic fracturing —known as fracking—the ocean off Long Island could be the site of a terminal that opponents charged at a recent public hearing is aimed at sending gas fracked in the U.S. to foreign nations.

             Meanwhile, the powerful documentary Gasland II—which concludes with documents showing the U.S. gas industry seeks to export much of the gas fracked in the U.S.—was screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival. It received a standing ovation from the packed audience at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Afterwards, there was a panel discussion organized and led by actor Alec Baldwin. It included Josh Fox, director, narrator and writer of Gasland II and the earlier documentary, Gasland, which in 2011 was awarded an Emmy and nominated for an Academy Award. I was also on the panel.

The Suffolk Legislature has now passed two bills on fracking: one to block water utilized in the process from being sent to any sewage plant in Suffolk for disposal, and a second barring “the use of hydraulic fracturing brine” on county property or roadways.

Fracking uses massive amounts of water sent under high pressure, along with 700 chemicals, into shale deposits to fracture them and release the gas held in them. Some of the chemicals are “known carcinogens,” notes the first bill. It warns of fracking wastewater being discharged from sewage plants to then “feed into Long Island’s sole source aquifer.”

As to “fracturing brine,” this is also a fracking “waste product,” notes the second bill,  and “some businesses that perform hydraulic fracking would like to dispose of such brine by providing it to local governments as a road de-icing agent for use in the winter.”

The hearing July 9 on the proposed offshore gas terminal was held in Long Beach. A $300 million project of Liberty Natural Gas, it would be set up 19 miles south of Jones Beach. Although the company claims its purpose is to import gas, speakers challenged this at the crowded hearing run by the U.S. Maritime Administration and Coast Guard.

Catskills Citizens for Safe Energy issued a statement declaring that the U.S. gas industry through fracking “is now producing so much gas” that it “plans to export half of it…overseas.” Although the terminal’s “sponsors claim that their facility will be used to import gas,” an amendment was made last year to federal regulations that allows for “export as well as import.” The planned terminal “off Long Island would be perfectly situated to export fracked gas…to Europe and Asia. If that happens, then fracking in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will be ramped up, and the pressure to frack New York might prove to be irresistible.” There has been a New York State moratorium that has expired on fracking. Governor Cuomo is considering whether to now permit it. 

Gasland II puts the fracking situation in sharp and comprehensive focus. Josh Fox began investigating fracking after his family got a $100,000 offer to frack on land on which his father built a house in the woods of Pennsylvania. What he uncovered and presented in his first documentary, Gasland, was literally explosive. People all over the U.S. whose property is used for fracking have their well water loaded with gas. What comes out of their water faucets is shown repeatedly in Gasland bursting into flames when lit with a match.

Gasland revealed the identity of the toxic chemicals used in fracking. And it chronicled the serious health impacts to people along with the environmental devastation from fracking.  

I commented on the panel July 5 at Guild Hall that when I heard Mr. Fox was doing Gasland II, I could not see how he could follow his astounding earlier documentary—but that he broadened it “with perfection” and it is as important and powerful as the first film.

In Gasland II, now being aired on HBO, Mr. Fox not only widens his examination of the health and environmental disasters caused by fracking but exposes how governments—led by the Obama administration—have eagerly allowed fracking to happen and expand. Gasland II spotlights fracking as a major contributor to climate change. It reveals the gas industry’s hold on governments. As U.S. Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina says in Gasland II about industry influence over Congress: “Try ownership, really.” It tells how the gas industry’s lead PR firm pushing fracking was a pioneer in claiming cigarettes are safe. It provides expert analysis about fracking being unnecessary—how safe, clean, renewable energy can provide all the power we need. It presents data linking fracking to earthquakes. Gasland II shows again and again peoples’ drinking water on fire. It cites fracking as also releasing radioactive poisons held in the shale. A rape of the planet and an attack on peoples’ health is underway. Gasland and Gasland II—must-see documentaries.

Weiner and Spitzer -- Meshugganah Chutzpah

(Published on The Times of Israel, July 24, 2014)

At the far edges of chutzpah—Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer.

            Even in New York City, a town famed for chutzpah, Weiner’s performance this week was far-out. There he was trying to deflect disclosures that his practice of wholesale sexting didn’t end after he abruptly resigned his seat in the U.S. Congress two years ago when his sending many women naked pictures of himself and raunchy online messages was first revealed.

“I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out and today they have,” declared Weiner at his press conference Tuesday. He sent them for more than a year after he quit Congress vowing to deal with his sexting habit.

 After his short stay out of politics, Weiner came back in full force in May announcing he was running for New York mayor to succeed term-limited Michael Bloomberg. And, in recent weeks, as he campaigned aggressively, he had shot up in the polls and was the front-runner. He insisted Tuesday that he would remain in the race.

Spitzer, who resigned suddenly as New York State’s governor in 2008 for “personal failings”—it was revealed that he was a regular client of a high-priced prostitution ring—announced earlier this month he was running for the Number 3 job in New York City, comptroller.

Lavishly spending from his family’s fortune made in New York real estate, Spitzer has been on a hyper-intense campaign, paralleling Weiner’s, and also, according to the polls, making political headway.

This week, a new Spitzer TV commercial flooded New York TV beginning with Spitzer declaring, “Look, I failed. Big time.” But having as New York attorney general been “sheriff of Wall Street”—taking on wheeler-dealers there—he said he should now be given “a fair shot” to return.

Weiner and Spitzer have become veritable gags in New York City politics—indeed, laughing stocks on the national level.

Andy Borowitz’s humor blog on The New Yorker website Tuesday was headlined, “Weiner Continues Sexting During Apology.” It claimed—in jest, of course—that “Weiner stirred controversy today by continuing to send dirty texts throughout a press conference devoted to apologizing for his behavior. Mr. Weiner was halfway through his apology when reporters noticed him remove a phone from his pocket and aim its camera lens unmistakably in the direction of his pants. After seeing the candidate snap a photo of the pants region and then send a text, reporters bombarded Mr. Weiner with questions, asking him if he had in fact just sexted. ‘Yes, I did, but I swear this was the last time,’ he said. ‘This behavior is now behind me.’ Mr. Weiner then concluded his press conference by removing his shirt and snapping a quick shot of his naked torso.”

            And serious issues about stability are being raised.

            Frank Bruni in his column in The New York Times on July 9 wrote that Weiner was “angling for a gigantic promotion. In the narrative he’s constructed, his mortification has made him a new man, so we’re supposed to give him an extra measure of our trust and hand him the reigns of the most important and most complicated city in the country. I know we like our mayors brash, but we needn’t accept delusional in the bargain.”

            As for Spitzer, Bruni skewered his record as governor charging—accurately—that he “was shaping up to be a self-righteous, self-defeating disaster of a governor.”

            As governor for little over a year, Spitzer proclaimed himself a “steamroller”—and in his dysfunction exhibited the sensitivity of such a machine.

            Commented Dan Janison in a column in Long Island’s Newsday on July 12, “Politics is just one business, of course, where ruthlessness can be a character reference and hypocrisies are inevitable. But a prospective public servant’s ability to act sensibly also is worth considering.”

            Weiner and Spitzer are Democrats. Dr. Kenneth Sherrill, Professor Emeritus of political science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, has stated that “the two of them, in two different races, may have the effect of pulling each other down” by giving Republicans a chance to present Democrats as morally challenged.

            There has been, however, a history in America in recent years of forgiving scandal-scarred politicians. President Bill Clinton managed to survive his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, beat impeachment and now has become an elder statesman of the Democratic Party. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford abruptly resigned in 2009 after he disappeared for a week and it was disclosed that he was in Argentina pursing an affair with a woman there—but he was elected to a seat in Congress earlier this year.  In an article this month on this, The New York Times related that “all across the country” politicians “tainted by scandal, some of them seemingly mudded beyond saving,” have gone on to survive politically.

            Still, can Weiner and Spitzer make it when their behavior, perhaps forgivable to some, is combined with a lack of stability and an absence of sensibility—and a meshugganah arrogance?