My humble offer to this conversation would be my curiosity over why anyone would assume as a given that Al Gore has any good intentions.

Many can understand then borrow (or borrow some of) the truth, but that doesn’t mean they are somehow flawed in courage or intellect when they betray it.

I’ll never forget his smug demeanor when he filibustered and forced Perot to answer to ad hominem and non sequitur….I’ll guess lying, insincere, shitty little attorney prince over stupid (by itself anyways), flawed, well intentioned coward.

i do have another recommend, from my personal “required reading list” somewhat along the same theme, basically… rooting out the “unseen hand that has shaped our country & world”.

more info/reading augmenting Gatto’s robber barons’ escapades-
Gustavas Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes
http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/myers/myers_index.html
great stuff on the formation of the supremes.

along w/writings of Eustace Mullins, and many others i have yet to dip a toe in. just delete all after the .com, you’ll find the main index page.

yamaguchy, who maintains the site, has taken great pains to gather/research/upload these offerings, and i’m eternally grateful, as he’s the only current online link i can find for Myers’ work.
if you find you enjoy the site, please let him(?) know, and direct him here…. he may visit, and i’m sure his presence on DV will be a positive addition :) his commentaries on various essays offered on InformationClearingHouse have greatly elevated the tone and scope of discussions there :) in the past i’ve recommended Myers’ work offered on his site… and apparently someone who visited, suggested he visit ICH and join in. possibly, we’ll be as lucky here.

hatt-ip to yamaguchy for all his efforts, and the public service he(?) performs in sharing knowledge/w us all, here online.

footnote on gatto, he’s trying to get a movie made concerning his book, and i wish him well. if any of you happen to know of any sources for help in the assoc. production areas please let him know. i’ve no idea as to how far along his efforts have gotten, to date…

thanks for your indulgence on my longwinded reply.. didn’t have too much time to edit, and i have 3 preteens underfoot this aftn… please forgive any mental lapses :)

http://books.google.com/books?id=Y08hAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=george+ade+the+man+who+%22didn+t%22+care+for+story+books&source=we
b&ots=ZUQfeI8K0H&sig=0JyKbr4w_n8Oc6eKUxXUJpgKlxY#PPA195,M1

Gerald Spezio, you exalt me with your compliments and then you go and step on my blue suede shoes. The novel is the expression of the ultimate human ambition - to create reality itself! Don’t you ever get tired of your old non-fiction world and yearn for some variety? And let’s be honest here. You’ve got one of those awful things in your bottom drawer…out of sight….but not forgotten…

I think that Gatto is a tough intellectual tackle, and well worth our attention.
If it weren’t for you, kikz, I would have missed him.
Great stuff in the grand tradition of Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich

I read much of Gatto’s great site, but I was really moved by this powerful factual commentary about grads of colleges of so-called education; in a footnote, no less.
These intellectual boneheads run the public school systems and the educational establishment in general..

*For instance, for those of you who believe in testing, school superintendents as a class are virtually the stupidest people to pass through a graduate college program, ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally “supervice,” (on the Graduate Record Examination), abd about eighty points below secondary-school teachers, while teachers themselves as an aggregate finish seventeenth of twenty occupational groups surveyed. The reader is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally, or that the moon is composed of blue, not green, cheese as is popularly believed. It’s also possible to take this anomaly as conclusive evidence of the irrelevance of standardized testing. Your choice.

I think that Gatto is a tough intellectual tackle, and well worth our attention.
If it weren’t for you, kikz, I would have missed him.
Great stuff in the grand tradition of Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich

I read much of Gatto’s great site, but I was really moved by this powerful factual commentary about grads of colleges of so-called education; in a footnote, no less.
These intellectual boneheads run the public school system.

*For instance, for those of you who believe in testing, school superintendents as a class are virtually the stupidest people to pass through a graduate college program, ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally “supervice,” (on the Graduate Record Examination), abd about eighty points below secondary-school teachers, while teachers themselves as an aggregate finish seventeenth of twenty occupational groups surveyed. The reader is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally, or that the moon is composed of blue, not green, cheese as is popularly believed. It’s also possible to take this anomaly as conclusive evidence of the irrelevance of standardized testing. Your choice.

Al Gore is the best mainstream candidate, and that is bad enough.
But I fear that will are going to get Hilarious whore and continuing Muslim murder stuffed down our throats.

I read much of your site, and have a single nit/criticism concerning your limited discussion of Tesla and free energy.
Joe, you write; and I will read.
Grazi.

Probably it is grasping at any hope in what seems like a hopeless time. Calling presidents dictators and the worst ever is about as common in American history as the fundamentalists congregating on mountain tops awaiting the second return. When it finally happens who’s going to believe it? Incremental Fascism
is seeping over the door sill and most no one notices that their feet are wet. I would find it entertaining to watch the mindless majority get their just desserts if they weren’t dragging me along. Nor do I expect much improvement. I don’t think Americans have shown much fight since the great strikes of 1877. That’s a long dry spell.

So for the present I will go on believing that Gore is watching the water shy horse; to believe otherwise would be giving up any hope. At some point reality will bite deeply into the sham and delusion of America’s mindless consumerism. At that point people will either roll over or raise holy hell. I’ve often wondered what American history would have been if a unitary leader had arisen in 1877. Maybe we’ll get a second chance to find out. Gore? Who knows. It will depend on the people he has around him because that’s what makes great leaders, not the leader.

Gore demonstrated a sad lack of political courage when he allowed the 2000 election to be stolen from him. He had the people on his side and he could have loudly challenged the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and scared them off. All he needed was a quick consultation with any of the Constitutional specialists in his camp to generate a NYT headline about bogus 14th amendment arguments and the violation of state’s rights and the 5 right wing hacks would have run for cover and the recount would have continued under Florida law to his inevitable victory.

Gore had no business kissing the hem of Bush’s robe following 911, either. He poses as a visionary defender of reason, but did not show the circumspection of a palsied Robert Byrd and others of his party. He abandoned reason in his response to the destruction of the WTC, and proudly gave himself over to unbridled emotion of the lowest sort - uncritical patriotism - at a moment when leadership demanded restraint and reflection. Barbara Lee demonstrates a greater capacity for reason than he does.

His book, which is part of the carefully crafted package of the new Al Gore, presidential hopeful or not, demonstrates a profound reluctance to confront corporate power. To be of service to the Constitution, he has to draw his sword and face the dragon. Have an Oscar and a Nobel Prize given him a new courage and resolve? Could he be more than Clinton’s sidekick now?

When Amy Goodman asked Ralph Nader whether Al could face down the corporate beast if he had the power of the presidency in hand, Ralph Nader said: “No.”

I also can’t see Gore as a friend of the corporate media else why would they have made such a concerted effort to wreck and distort his 2000 campaign. As for not contesting the election results the only appeal past the Supreme Court is divinity and I don’t think it would have helped much.

Nor was there much point in mentioning impeachment, in fact any issue that depends on our corporate puppet congress and senate. It ain’t gonna happen.

Gore has the best chance of anyone out there right now of winning the 2008 election but he’s walking away from it, unless he’s pulling off the best George Washington campaign since George Washington. Otherwise I think he really would like to see great changes in our government but realizes that no politician has the power to buck our corporate/facist state right now, even the president.

No one is perfect but I think you’ve gone pretty far off base on Gore. He opposed the Iraq invasion and predicted what would happen so I can’t see that swearing fealty to bush. And do you really think pointing out the inconsistencies of the 911 fairy tale would accomplish any purpose except to feed Fox, Coulter and limbaugh? He’s not going to win the Pulitzer for his book but so far he’s one of very few democrats to walk away from the DLC and the corporate mess we call a democratic government.

And speaking of underlying power, why do you think TV is now so dominant in our “marketplace of ideas”? That’s because corporate capitalism requires mass TV addiction. Nothing else can possibly achieve the requisite kinds of marketing “penetration” and political demobilization.

And speaking of underlying power, why do you think TV is now so dominant in our “marketplace of ideas”? That’s because corporate capitalism requires mass TV addiction. Nothing else can possibly achieve the requisite kinds of marketing “penetration” and political demobilization.

you’ve supplied the answer to my question. tv.

i’d like to add to your opine…
“in The Assault On Reason by refusing to confront the corporate theft of the mass media, the impeachment of the derelicts in the White House, the 911 truth movement, or the misuse of Supreme Court power and the blatant electoral fraud that cost him the presidency in 2000. This part of the democratic conversation is politically inconvenient for Al for some obscure reason. It is truly a remarkable achievement that ostensibly liberal, progressive, and wannabe populist Al Gore could write this book and never even mention these bedrock issues of our day.”

…in the recognition of another phalanx of attack on reason in general, the us education system. John Taylor Gatto’s “Underground History of American Edu.”
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
free online/in entirety
does more than an ample job of explaining the true scope/goal of the systemically designed class war/assault on reason America has currently engaged in for a very long time.

snip from chap 8: Plato’s Guardians
… As long as such a pump existed to spew limitless numbers of independent, self-reliant, resourceful, and ambitious minds onto the scene, who could predict what risk to capital might strike next? To minds capable of thinking cosmically like Carnegie’s, Rockefeller’s, Rothschild’s, Morgan’s, or Cecil Rhodes’, real scientific control of overproduction must rest ultimately on the power to constrain the production of intellect. Here was a task worthy of immortals. Coal provided capital to finance it.

Through the dependence of the all on the few, an instrument of management and of elite association would be created far beyond anything ever seen in the past. This powerful promise was, however, fragilely balanced atop the need to homogenize the population and all its descendant generations.1 A mass production economy can neither be created nor sustained without a leveled population, one conditioned to mass habits, mass tastes, mass enthusiasms, predictable mass behaviors. The will of both maker and purchaser had to give way to the predestinated output of machinery with a one-track mind.

Nothing posed a more formidable obstacle than the American family. Traditionally, a self-sufficient production unit for which the marketplace played only an incidental role, the American family grew and produced its own food, cooked and served it; made its own soap and clothing. And provided its own transportation, entertainment, health care, and old age assistance. It entered freely into cooperative associations with neighbors, not with corporations. If that way of life had continued successfully—as it has for the modern Amish—it would have spelled curtains for corporate society.

there is absolutely no question as to why al, bearer of light/truth will never direct anyone away from his thrown shadows (current tv) on the wall of Plato’s Cave.