Green Fracking?

Green Fracking?

Re: Commentary by John Streicker (Whitehorse city councillor), Star, 2 Aug. 2013.

According to a short bio taken from the YEC site, John Streicker has a Bachelor degree in computer science and Geography and a Masters degree in Geodesy and Geomatics; Which is essentially more geography, GIS, mapping etc. as his qualification of a registered engineer. The Duty of a Professional Engineer to the Public under the Code of Ethics of the Association of Professional Engineers of Yukon clearly stipulates that: “ Every professional engineer shall: 

1. regard their duty to public welfare as paramount; 

4. not express publicly, ... opinions on professional engineering that are not founded on adequate knowledge ...”.

Short of qualifications not listed, it means as an engineer, he should not speak to drill technology and field geology (I have work experience and training in those fields).  If he could talk about well bore integrity his statements would have to include existing and certain harm to the public. This has been left out of his statements on hydraulic fracturing.

John Streicker speculates about risks of gas fracking. In reality the already accumulated evidence for harm to environment, economy and energy security describes a prohibitive certainty, according to leading independent scholars and experts.  Among them are natural gas drilling veteran and inventor, Dr. Ingraffea, and natural gas drilling entrepreneurs such as Arthur Berman, along with veteran economists and financial analysts for natural gas like Deborah Rogers.  Beyond that, there are many more aspects of intensifying damage in abandoned and forever decaying frack gas fields.

Streicker states: “These (risks) include water usage (1), contamination (2), and fugitive emissions (3).  All three of these risks depend on the integrity of the wells drilled.” 

This limitation and linking of pollution only to well integrity has no basis in Petroleum Engineering, Hydrology and Geology.

1. Water contamination is not limited to the effect of well failures which are fairly constant at about one third of all wells within 20 years.  It is not water that is pumped downhole, as Streicker claims, but frack fluid which is water polluted by toxic frack ingredients and chemicals like Benzene and Glycol.  Regardless of well failures, on average, water turned into polluted frack fluid has increased to about 50 million litres per well. This is equivalent to trillions of litres from one of the Yukon Southern Lakes to frack about 100 000 wells. These are typical figures for full spatial build out of a large shale development like the Horn Basin, or potentially the Whitehorse Trough. 

2.  Methane that never touched the well area rises up through fault lines and fissures from fractured deep shale, some of which goes into solution in water bodies. This is demonstrated in “Potential Contamination Pathways from Hydraulically Fractured Shale to Aquifers” by Tom Myers in the scientific “Groundwater” journal, April 2012.  Myers’ modelling represented an important achievement as methane goes into solution of lake, river and aquifer water. There it is found in toxic concentrations, while the individual faultline/fissure pathways are hard to pinpoint.

3.  Obviously, fugitive emissions are not limited to the gas well zone and cannot be minimized by improvements in drill technology. Streicker states, “As a fossil fuel, I think we should consider it only if we have confidence that fugitive emissions will be well below one per cent.” There is no basis to talk about minimal fugitive emissions of frack gas development that would or could be under 1 % of production. Indications and evidence for fugitive well emissions around 4 - 8 %, many fold of Streicker’s considerations, existed for some time and the percentage is increasing.  At an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in Dec. 2012, delegations of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado at Boulder looked at the trend of peer reviewed studies. One recent study showed a figure of 9 per cent fugitive well emissions of total frack gas production, but the findings may continue to creep upwards. 

Streicker raises the expectation that regional energy needs would be met by local natural gas production: ”And this convoluted path brings us back to natural gas, because it is a potential local energy source.” This is another complete fiction. Companies at the doorstep or already operating in Yukon like the China National Off Shore Oil Corporation, Shell, Encana or others like them, are not interested in Yukon jobs or the heating of Yukon homes.  Their focus is to profiteer on financial, carbon trade and other subsidy markets and make our energy security and affordability dependent on their whims. Natural gas is never produced for local needs in the way of renewable energy. Producing regions have, except for a shipping discount, no priority access to their gas, which levels out in a North America wide distribution.

Mr. Streicker wants to “... establish solid regulations.” That only makes sense as part of gas fracking. Along regulations it does not improve safety but descend into a standard of more and more brute force destruction of geology and total degradation of landscape.

Streicker posts on a Green Party blog, "Our prime alternate energy potential is natural gas."  This is a continuing drive towards gas fracking the Yukon. According to up to date oil & gas reserve studies at the Yukon Geological Survey, Yukon doesn’t have proven, recoverable, conventional natural gas reserves. 

Streicker follows the concept of fracked gas as alternate energy; When on the contrary, it is the dirtiest fuel known to man but it just sounds a little bit like alternative energy. Recently, visitors to Whitehorse City Council chambers have noticed city councillor Streicker leaves no hair un-split and no stone unturned to stop city council from passing a frack free resolution. It would follow the common sense of municipalities across North America, CYFN and the Vuntut Gwitchin in passing a frack free resolution.  The resolution is before council partly as a deterrent against threats to Whitehorse drinking water such as gas fracking into the Whitehorse aquifer.  This is relevant as the oil & gas moratorium for the Whitehorse Trough will run out in 2016. 

A cold pursuit of gas fracking the Yukon, somewhat disguised by a language of ecological sentiment, requires this high level of communication skills. It also involves a disrespect to those green minded people who gave Mr. Streicker their support. 

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A story of gas frackers on the dole

A story of gas frackers on the dole

A study on the frack gas potential in the Whitehorse Trough was released by the Yukon Geological Survey on July 4, 2012 that had been commissioned in September 2011. 

 The choice of firm is of interest.

Petrel & Robertson, Calgary, is a consulting firm known for a stake in oil derivative speculation, as well as lobbying for oil subsidies and media consulting. A peculiar choice from the point of view of a level of objectivity in scientific endeavour.

 It suggests conventional field economics, which is what most people would imagine with regard to fossil energy or any other resource extraction, are only a part of the background. The other part is a shadowy world of street economics and financial illusions hiding behind industrial appearances.

Put that together with an industry context of natural gas price dumping to suck people into profiteering schemes and with the problem of shale gas and oil reserve estimates that have wildly fluctuated in recent years. 

 None of which is recognized in the study in as much as basic awareness. Definitions and geological characterizations that form assumptions on which such shale reserve estimates are based upon are less exact than the data that come from drilling for minerals or conventional oil and gas reservoirs. Shale gas is neither firmly anchored in rock, as are gold veins for example, nor does it flow freely as conventional oil and gas does from or within its reservoir cavities. 

 It is defined by complex conditions of a slow permeability that is unknown in its level of natural fracturedness containing gas or releasing gas until drilled, perfed, fracked and brittled foot by foot and inch by inch. 

 In deep, dark depths a perfect scenario appears for the expanding hedge fund, oil futures and subsidy lobby departments of Exxon Mobile, Shell Oil, Encana and Petrel & Robertson.

 The Potential Gas Committee, a US industry association, evaluated the likely total recoverable US reserves of natural gas as sufficient for 25 years of US demand. 

 The same data set shows shale gas reserves are good for 6 - 7 years of current US demand levels, not centuries, and that is without taking expanded use and export scenarios into account. 

 In 2009 the US Geological Survey downgraded the Marcellus Shale (New England) gas potential to 20 % down from the type of generous frack gas estimates Petrel & Robertson are presenting. 

 Balanced assumptions would have been critical for the analysis of frack gas potential in the Whse Trough.

 Among the referenced sources of the study is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists known for their support of climate denial.

 Temple burners taking over professional associations? It sounds like a joke as long as we don’t take stock of how many of the academics of Energy Mines and Resources in Yukon have surrendered their bullshit detector to such UnCanadian culture warring.

Impartial veterans of the natural gas resource industry, like Dr. Ingraffea of Cornell University, are not found among the sources.

 In those regards Petrel & Robertson present an unreconstructed impression of shale reserve analysis that is not updated with the best of caution regarding what realistically might be out there. 

 Their study in its suggestion of economic viability of frack gas production shows no intelligent risk assessment of the true data variance it deals with.

 What kind of accuracy can one expect for the commercial possibilities when the methane leakage is overlooked that would cook the climate faster than anything and a destruction of water tables that is guaranteed?

 Remember the role credit rating agencies like Moodies, Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Group have played and continue to play in assigning fictitious value to speculators and their papers? The Petrel & Robertsons are the Oil & Gas Moodies and Fitchs when it comes to creating gas reserve estimates by mixing geology with science fiction.

 Net energy and affordable energy from fossil fuels continue to decline more and faster all the time. The more hand outs which go to the already overstuffed Petrel & Robertsons and Exxons of this world, the greater the energy problem is becoming.

 It is entertainment we are offered that, even with a five year anti frack moratorium for the Whitehorse Trough in place, comes with a horrendous price tag. Gullibility of government is never excusable but a full spectrum gloss and glitz brain wash for natural gas sweeping all media can explain it.

 Brad J.R. Hayes, who authored the study, and others at Petrel & Robertson find their path smoothed by even bigger fish in the propaganda business. In 2009 the media consulting firm Hill & Knowlton was funded with tens of milions of dollars by America's Natural Gas Alliance alone to carry forward the media arrangements on behalf of gas fracking. This particular PR firm appears to have been chosen by the oil industry because of their legendary success in delaying anti-tobacco measures and awareness for several decades. Who gets hired matters.

Where the fracking problem came from

Where the fracking problem came from

The Yukon government has brought forth the idea that gas fracking would provide for our current and future energy needs. This is false.  

It’s hard to make sense of these extreme and shortsighted developments without at least a brief look into the oil and gas industry. It's a global scene with no insulated sphere of interest or operation, no matter how hard the government tried to keep information and involved identities from the public. The unfortunate reality is that the strength and capacity of the industry is fading, but they are able to maintain their position and power through manipulation of data, financial speculation and global military power.  

The Yukon recently set a 5 year moratorium on allowing oil and gas exploration in the Whitehorse Trough. We need to actively spend the next five years learning, and then educating and influencing our government, family and friends about the real truth about shale gas deposits.  

Shale gas deposits are generally overestimated.  Where they have been exploited, like the Texas Barnett shale, gas runs out within only 5, 6 or 7 years. 

Over the past five years, the production levels of large oil and gas deposits worldwide have entered a free fall mode. The significance for shale gas retrieval of this decline is that the economic viability of the entire fossil fuel system is now staked on shale.

In over 40 years no new 'giant oil or gas field' has been found, except for the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan which was discovered 33 years ago! 

Giant oil fields may be expected to maintain reasonable and efficient production levels for a period of 15 to 40 years.

The fossil fuel industry has its back to the wall, faced with the reality of climate change, and it’s net energy production has evaporated.

The deposits for extraction that once were cheap and did not require excessive and growing amounts of energy to be used during extraction, are history. 

There is a growing sense of desperation in Big Oil as they try to maintain contracts with governments in order to rake in record subsidies, regardless of the impact of their industry on the health and wealth of nations.

Over the past three years, Big Oil has systematically bought out the money-losing 'frack' gas sector to maintain the perception of viability. This in turn, has encouraged hedge fund profiteering and contributed to financial instability globally. 

The inflated numbers regarding the potential of reserves, their finances and net production figures of 'frack gas' (which is heavily subsidized) are at the fore front of the fossil fuel illusion. 

Mainstream media frequently represents the production peak or stagnation of oil output as a quasi philosophical question which is not real. The framing of the discussion in this way allows people to ignore our need to switch our energy sources from non-renewable to renewable. 

Energy planning and grid development are part of a truly complex evolutionary system change and cannot be forced over night. What the critics of renewables overlook is their politically created backlog of a now even over mature potential that in some countries is part of a successful catchup phase. 

What really matters for the big economic picture when producing energy is to achieve more than ten barrels of energy for each one barrel invested. The renewable energy sector has it and and improves it. The fossil fuel sector lost net energy efficiency years ago and there is no justification for operational expansion.

Does it make sense to use more and more energy to actually produce less and less energy? That is exactly what the current North American energy system continues to promote, as sources of fossil fuels become harder and harder to extract and process.  

As parts of our world choose to rely on energy sources like unconventional shale gas extraction (ie. fracking), and the mining of the Albertan tar sands, we are burning up huge amounts of conventional resources to do that. The use and promotion of these extreme processes clouds our judgement and presents a real danger to our environment, our health, our long-term economic capacity, our food security and our energy needs.

The end of fossil fuel domination is coming. It may not be tomorrow, but we will need to shift our energy demands and usage soon.  We would do well for ourselves to develop the infrastructure, the culture and the industrial capacity required to embrace renewable energy resources.  

In Yukon, public interest in renewable energy has grown significantly during this recent Oil and Gas Deposition process. 

The potential of industrial scale renewables need to be taken seriously.  

We need to move far beyond the hobby level development of renewable sources or the good-will gestures that all our political representatives seem to limit themselves to. 

It is exemplified by ineffectual, misleading and outdated concepts like net metering, base load obsession and denial of green energy legislation proposals.

If we continue using and making long term plans based upon fossil fuels, we will not only poison our water, soil and air but also diminish our future energy security and affordability, as well as economic well being. 

What about preserving some of this one time gift from nature as petrochemical manufacturing base for future generations?

A reality check is urgent as the coming weeks and months will likely see more 'crazy energy' proposals by government and Big Oil.

Happy Easter 2012 Rex Murphy,

I don’t why I listened to your show about the continuing F-35 debacle, I suppose even from evil bias one can learn something.

How did you manage to get through without mentioning or allowing to surface the leaked evaluation of the RAND corporation following war game simulations where the F-35 was outclassed by the Sukhoi Su-35 as well as a version of the Chinese Chengdu fighter series? It is what had triggered the international F-35 discontent, eventually spilling into Canada.

This capability study of the F-35 Lightning 2 aircraft was summarized by former US Air force officer and Rand researcher John Stillion with the following assessment: ”cant turn, can’t climb, can’t run”. The Australian government, the US Navy and others paid attention, but certainly not the Harper government. 

At the time my blog entry F-35 Double Insult was syndicated by several print and internet media.

It wouldn’t be me to bring it forward since I was blacklisted from your show on Remembrance Day 2007 because I mentioned the Canadian MacPap veterans from the Spanish Civil War. And the trinket you promised me for supposedly just not making it to one of the following shows after two hours stand by on the phone never arrived, showing disdain to liberty and honour, not very good, Rex.

Given the unfairness and disrespect you consistently show to oil and gas fracking critics and democratic tradition in general, I say:

You are a hopeless reactionary, but still, frack your drinking water

Peter Becker, Whitehorse

Reform Movement in the West and Confusion with ‘Capitalism'

Reform Movement in the West and Confusion with ‘Capitalism'

A great people’s movement is sweeping around the world without easy equals in recent times short of the democratic strides that were made the world over in the 1830s and 1840s.

Even with that in mind it is unique because this time the Bolivarian reforms in Latin

America, the Arab and muslim movements are ahead of the Western intellect and initiative that eventually resurfaced with the occupy movement.

And that is fine, except that its not yet worked out in which ways our Western reform thinking and activism are still to weak to actually break through. The movement will go where it goes but there is one small step ahead we can take. I am examining a very popular but a bit inaccurate approach that is quite typically used, especially as a way of summing up a situation. I think there is a downside in continuously confronting injustice by naming it as the so called ‘capitalism’. I am trying to show how this prevents a process of clarification and the building of a forceful momentum. By way of deep organizing, political, labour and rural movement grew powerful in times past exactly to such game changing levels.

The West is still the West for better or worse, from Spain to Greece to Italy, to Ireland, Germany, the US, Canada and many other great countries. Now as in the 1840s there is a remarkably common set of perceptions and also misperceptions that circumscribe the scene. It is a different narrative in Latin America and the illegal but successful mass strikes in China against sweatshop working conditions seem to remember European and North American labour history better than we do.

What is the Gordian knot problem in the story? What we have not quite inherited from movements before our time and in other places is the authentic bite in word and direction that gave and gives them positive populist ascendency. In the 17 and 18 hundreds middle class and capitalist sectors in society demanded from kings and feudal elites to scale back militarism, financial manipulation and real estate speculation. The first British PM Robert Walpole stopped the ruinous Great South Sea real estate bubble in Britain and launched infant industry investment by government initiative with phenomenal success. New found power and confidence engaged in and merged into many progressive trends. By way of struggle and also consensus, goals like education, children’s rights, suffrage, old age security and access to medical treatment materialized over time. New ways of a social contract emerged. Social rights morphed out of a slow swap with common wealth of in many situations once free pastures, security providing village life and treasures of the woods of a rural world that was invaded by industries.

Political and economic rights were achieved against feudal elites sometimes allied with industrial elites. But many capitalists like Robert Owen, Friedrich Engels and Andrew Carnegie but also Henry Ford and others supported workers partly because they were aware that their own means grew because of worker productivity as close twin to worker well being.

If there is a crisis of capitalism it means exactly that, a crisis in which two centuries of progressive trends, a lot of constructive, dynamic but also adversarially arrived at  achievements and characteristics are given up in favour of a pre industrial reach back. From a vantage point of consideration and heritage of who we are it hurts to hear from well meaning people the repetitious verbalism of challenging so called ‘capitalism’, regardless of how empty and misleading the false front has become. It follows that the capitalism criticism has a habit of calling crime proceeds profits, and there is more costly beautification.

What is the effect of this, how does confusion stall reform? Its not helpful to provide, with the capitalist label, unintentional acceptance or slack opposition to a wide range of reactionary trends of militarism, mercantilism and morbid banking monopolies. Further there is subsidization of outdated energy technology and marginalization of entrepreneurial infant industry. We see a revival of 18th century inspired commons enclosures in the privatization of commons spheres like water and generally in the destruction of ecological survival. In best feudal tradition discourse has become stilted and ritualized through the fabrication of free-trade foundations that never existed, anti science magic and anti literacy oriented image obsession. All these represent, significantly so, neo-feudal, anti democratic illnesses which are not actively clarified. Their proponents receive a free ride with the endorsement of being called capitalist. The imposter image of ‘capitalism’ is waterproofed by way of having it certified by its critics. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by validating totalitarian class warriors, criminals and ideologues who parade as market based entrepreneurs. In short, don’t empower the SOB positions. 

Michael Moore made a doc film presenting a notion which is well captured in the film’s title “Capitalism a Love Story”. And then his empathetically told stories of injustice caused by robbery evaporated somewhat by barking up the wrong tree.

Who is in love with what and who can’t let go of it?

Just look at the downward spiral of manufacturing in North America, capital investment in the production of goods which constitutes, which defines capitalism, is in full retreat. Feudal colonialism really comes home to many places in the West with a gas fracking craze that reminds of King Leopold’s obsession for resource extraction in the Congo. A hasty industrial retreat is not without consequences as exporting jobs and giving up on infrastructure progress here also means to literally poison labour and life conditions as well as land and water and invade self determination for people in China and other developing countries; Aside to blindly burning away, as transport diesel, the petrochemical production base of their and our future generations in the name of a giddy shipping frenzy, called globalization that has run its course.

Totalitarian democracy like other dictatorial systems tend to build on false populism, on the demonization of government and its representative purpose. Sounds like incoherent nonsense?  Yes, because incoherency, magical thinking, anti literacy without memory deploying a drunken populism has always been the game of authoritarian rule.

The occupy movement has not yet grown out of the mesmeric impact of overwhelming media mind control in the west, embedded in plenty of false imagery from the ‘capitalism’ road show. Somewhere in that particular culture wasteland the emergence of a galvanizing and grounded narrative for progress is stuck so far.

Let’s  find a way to escape this long lasting flatness of pop culture, of the soaps and the Simpsons, of a teenage way of relating to the world without attention to elders, without carrying memory and without admiring wonder.

Our problems with relativism and false populism go on in the digital era with an uncritical enthusiasm for distorted rightwing and racist interpretations in movies like Zeitgeist and Strive. It shows how vulnerable we are to confusion tactics that sow doubt into our minds and distrust into our ability to produce true leadership.

In contrast the Bolivarian, the social democratic reformers in Latin America evolved by very carefully thinking through a difference between capital investment in production and innovation and education, be it private or public, and the destruction of neoliberal thinking. Because they understood the latter as an anti democratic, anti justice orientation towards outdated ways of speculation and colonialism. Consequently there was and is no lack of intellectual dynamics that would limit a reform process from becoming a transformative and self determining movement. 

Its not easy for us after decades of hypnotic saturation exposure to neoliberal media propaganda defrauding us from much of memory and reality. 

But galvanizing power, leadership and vision in a democracy movement is always possible if the narrative has the courage of a Midas touch. Think about the Matewan miner strike in West Virginia or the far reaching reforms that came out of the Mackenzie Papineau rebellion in Upper Canada. Overcome was a laziness to think, to debate, or even look.

From there the virtues, the vitality of communities together with investment in infant industries, like green energy, intense ecological agriculture, commons spheres like transportation, healthcare and education and remembering freedom of association for workers and neighbourhoods, can be renewed.

We have no time to loose in building strength and rolling with the punches. There is peace to achieve and to keep, as war and jingoism are the methods with which wounded empires attack solidarity.

Lincoln's Farm Dirt and Obama's Harvard Dust in ten raw points

1. Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama both stand out as presidents with necessary scholarly and oratory attributes in a time of crisis.

2. Lincoln appointed a team "Team of Rivals" (book title by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln and his government) who became both, critical debaters and loyal collaborators.
Obama may have his 'team of rivals' who behave like a team of traitors. (Since I wrote the essay this aspect has been documented by a veteran Washington journalist, I'll try to remember who it was)

3. Lincoln was not afraid to stare down anyone in the market square, think of the Douglas debates. At the height of the Civil War Lincoln met personally with Christopher Spencer, the inventor of the Spencer repeating rifle and carbine in an era of muzzle loaders. This was after the design had been rejected by the war department and was followed up on by Lincoln himself trying the rifle out on the White House lawn; 150 000 Spencer rifles performed a decisive argument in freeing the slaves.
On a similar note regards visionary technology the Obama administration gives zero emission transportation and therefore green industries no real chance. Despite an auto industry bail out GM was encouraged to continue to build vehicles within the game of the oil industry. Some time after the GM bail out GM announced a release date of November 2010 for the Chevy Volt electrical car. Its plug in range of 40 miles is a joke because it is about a quarter only of the range of the GM EV1 and Chevy Volt S-10 EV pick up trucks that were built in the 1990s before all of them were pulled back from their lessees and crushed, quasi as a signal to de-industrialize North America. Transportation technologies have always been the catalyst for overall industrial standards and this renewed blow to zero tailpipe emission transportation represents a serious set back for renewable energy technology. Fluffy thinking is wasting the opportunity for crucial green infant industry planning. Contrary to 'free' market and globalization ideologues from the Chicago business school the nurture and seed planting rules for public investment are no different now than for at one time kick starting fledgling coal, steel, shipping, military equipment, cotton and every other market. Weak industrial seedlings die and the ones nurtured to start up strength may live in a diverse market when government stops subsidizing and interfering on behalf of senile monopolies who are choking the market competition. Wall Street and Walmart, Fox News, the oil oligarchy and Eisenhower's "military industrial congressional complex" suffocate market activities with an anti entrepreneurial lobby culture driven stranglehold. This extends also to the so called agribusinesses like Monsanto, where lobby experts for a hellish genetic fascism had legislation changed in order to attack the essence of life, food. Such anti industrial financialism is not good for business, it just wiped close to half the world's wealth off the book. Entrepreneurial capitalism can return. 'Free' market means anti-market, an Orwellian code word, a demagogue's clever juggler trick. However, there is a little problem. Obama himself is an ivory tower 'free' trader, so when the Tea Party says that America was founded on 'free' trade and 'free' market principles he has nothing to come back with. Without ideological tie in it would be easy to point out that these are fairy tales, only some time after after WW2 did so called 'free' trade, 'free' market dogma, Washington Consensus and a variety of other globalization schemes start to play a dominant role. These constructs describe something very different than a market economy, they describe a radical elitism, a bankster feudalism where being born poor means to die poor, the exact opposite of the American traditions. With some gravity Obama needs to confront the demagogic extremisms of his time which is exactly what Lincoln did, recognize ecological limitations together with economic opportunities of the future. From there will come less momentum for foreign oil wars which undermine constitutional rights at home. A 'full measure of devotion' (Gettysburg Address) and conflicting technocratic measures are very different.

4. Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward and others in his cabinet were even more impatient abolitionists than the President.
Whereas Obama's vice president Joe Biden is a strong supporter of George Bush's bankruptcy law targeting little people, a step towards new debt slavery. Obama left it to the banks to eventually stop fraudulent foreclosures, far too late. A lost opportunity 'to cross the aisle' on a people's level. Compromise in policy is possible on the basis of the constitutional representative, legislative, executive and judicative structure but not with totalitarian sentiment of false populist instigators, like Rupert Murdoch for example who have severed loyalty with all democratic institutions; be it public schools and libraries, be it the judiciary and the law of the land like obligations under US broadcasting laws not to censor news, be it free and fair elections, a military that follows orders and not attempts to dictate to government.

5. Lincoln who was conscious of the danger that can come from influence of banks on government has famously expressed the notion that: "... facing the Confederate army with the banks behind me I fear the banks more."
Obama appointed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner who takes sides with financial free trade by opposing or even ignoring the possibility of a return of the Glass-Steagall legislation with which Franklin Delano Roosevelt controlled cancerous speculation that had lead to the Great Depression. Until 1999, when it was repealed under Bill Clinton, Glass-Steagall had protected people's savings and pensions but also commercial banking from theft hiding behind fancy titles. Obama's and Geitner's refusal to bring back this proven protective measure against crime continues to be an agent of chaos but also serves as the 'bail out' pathway for the greatest wealth shift of history into a 21th century feudalism.

6. Abraham Lincoln, as did Jefferson ("Light and Liberty go together" T. Jefferson 1795), supported the modern idea of public education, understood broad access to education as vital for a democratic society and for prosperity.
Obama adopts some of the worst of Democrat's heritage while ignoring the best of Republican's legacy in favoring the old class oriented concept of privatized schools, which nowadays appear largely in the form of Charter Schools. These Charter Schools are not just derived from 17th/18th century European aristocracy, in 19 century America private schools were founded to keep black children out.

7. President Lincoln opposed military adventurism when William Seward wanted to declare war on Spain and France and compromised domestically with great skill in order prevent a civil war, while this was possible.
Obama escalated the Afghanistan conflict, and in foreboding Vietnam War reminiscence widened the war of occupation and of bombing people, in this case into Pakistan. A futile calculation of gains from control of Central Asia and perhaps more from domestically playing a 'war on terror' propaganda is also behind his threats of war against Iran; and revenge regarding democratically elected Mosaddegh's nationalization of Persian oil in 1951 of course. Sowing wind in the Inner Asian Steppes right on the door steps and/or land borders of four nuclear powers, India, Pakistan, China and Russia, may yet reap storm.

8. Lincoln at times had an uncanny intuition of things to come. In a speech he gave to the Illinois House of Representatives on Dec., 18 in 1840 he said: "Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."


Different to Lincoln being able to look back at the great prohibition failure from 1920 - 1933, Obama continues Nixon's dirty war on drugs which polices and incarcerates almost exclusively low income people, who as a fact, consume no more street drugs than the well to do. It practically is "The New Jim Crow" (report by Michelle Alexander), which eats the wealth of nations and single handedly creates crime cartels that destroy entire countries such as Mexico.

9. Lincoln was good at timing, he knew a window of opportunity when it presented itself.
Obama still has one, he can prosecute the banksters, bring the Glass-Steagall legislation back, the appointment of Elizabeth Warren in connection with the new Consumer Protection Bureau was a hopeful sign. Since Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs, was ousted, she is a lonesome first in a 'team of rivals' that has Abraham Lincoln smiling.

10. In his appointments Lincoln played intentionally with fire but shrewdly guided and wisely harnessed its power on behalf of the people who he took great effort to win over; that is why Abraham Lincoln was re-elected for a second term in 1864. He would have known how to sort out the leadership of the Republican Fox Tea-V party especially when and where old or new slavery propaganda attacks the constitution. By breaking up totalitarian measures of predecessor Bush, like the off shore concentration camps of Bagram and Guantanamo and the Military Commissions Act and by remembering freedom of speech and association is not just for elites but also for working people? Its not just about Obama, if he fails another chance at a democratic revival may be generations away. In the presidential election of 2012 first African-American president and reluctant Lincoln scholar ...