Tuesday 15 December '09 show notes

  • Guests:
  • Topics:
    • Did Obama sell us out to the Wall Street banksters?
    • "A Heartbeat And A Guitar: Johnny Cash And The Making Of Bitter Tears"
    • Should we adopt China's one-child policy if it means we can save the planet?
    • Does the Rom Houben case revive the Terri Schiavo debate?
    • Do Copenhagen protestors want violence or just their voices to be heard?
  • Bumper Music:
  • Today's newsletter has details of today's guests and links to the major stories and alerts that Thom covered in the show, plus lots more. If you haven't signed up for the free newsletter yet, please do. If you missed today's newsletter, it is in the archive.
  • Quote: "Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing." -- Thomas Jefferson.
  • Article: Population control called key to deal by Li Xing.

    "Population and climate change are intertwined but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC).

    "Dealing with climate change is not simply an issue of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the population concern fits right into the picture," said Zhao, who is a member of the Chinese government delegation.

    Many studies link population growth with emissions and the effect of climate change."

  • Article: "Population control called key to deal" by Li Xing.

    "They’re passing around Thomas Wire of London School of Economics stats, too:

    Each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one ton” whereas it would cost $13 for reduced deforestation, $24 to use wind technology, $51 for solar power, $93 for introducing hybrid cars and $131 electric vehicles."

  • Article: The Supreme Court Takes Over. Excerpt from Chapter 5 of Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and Theft of Human Rights" by Thom Hartmann.

    "But the states, as Charles and Mary Beard write in The Rise of American Civilization, “had to reckon with the Federalist interpretation of the Constitution by John Marshall, who, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1801 to 1835, never failed to exalt the [pro-business] doctrines of Hamilton above the claims of the states.”

    Marshall, appointed to the Court by Federalist John Adams (who had appointed—for life—only Federalists to all federal judgeships), was what would today be called a judicial activist. As the Beards wrote, “By historic irony, he [Marshall] administered the oath of office to his bitterest enemy, Thomas Jefferson; and for a quarter of a century after the author of the Declaration of Independence retired to private life, the stern Chief Justice continued to announce old Federalist rulings from the Supreme Bench.”

    In 1803, during the second year of Jefferson’s presidency, Marshall took on a power for himself and future Supreme Courts, which made President Jefferson apoplectic. In the Marbury v. Madison case, as the Beards relate it, “Marshall had been in his high post only two years when he laid down for the first time in the name of the entire Court the doctrine that the judges have the power to declare an act of Congress null and void when in their opinion it violates the Constitution. This power was not expressly conferred on the Court [by the Constitution]. Though many able men had held that the judicial branch of the government enjoyed it, the principle was not positively established until 1803 [by Marshall’s ruling in this case]...”

    Jefferson, shocked, bluntly expressed his concern to his old friend Judge Spencer Roane, the son-in-law of Patrick Henry and a Justice of the Virginia Supreme Court. “If this opinion be sound,” Jefferson wrote, “then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se [legally, a suicide]. For intending to establish three departments, co-ordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone, the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one too, which is unelected by, and independent of the nation...."

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