Lessons Learned from Great NY Fires

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York in which 146 garment workers lost theirs lives.  But this wasn’t the only fire tragedy at the turn of the century that was made worse by a lack of safety standards.

On January 9, 1912, while battling a great blaze in New York City in which three firemen and six civilians would be killed, a Native American fireman Seneca Larke Jr. fought desperately to rescue more before they died.  His valor caught the public’s imagination.

On a cold morning the call had gone out for a fire at the Equitable Insurance Building in Manhattan, which housed stores, a restaurant, a lawyer’s club, and a bank. Upon arrival, Chief John Kenlon ordered his men into the building.

The weather was bitterly cold that day.  A steady, sharp wind blew and ice began forming on the equipment and the building.

William Giblin, the bank president and two employees, rushed to the basement vault to rescue millions of dollars in cash, bonds and securities.

Kenlon, his clothing and face icing up, looked on in despair as one of his chiefs, two firemen and six waiters in the club, plunged to their deaths.

Giblin and his colleagues, had become trapped in the basement but managed to call to firemen outside through a narrow, iron-barred window in the vault room.

As Kenlon and others watched, Larke started his desperate attempt to save Giblin and his colleagues.  He lay on his stomach on the ground at the basement window and sawed at the barred windows.

Water from the hoses showered onto him, turning him into an ice sculpture.  At one point, another firemen had to hammer ice off the arm of Larke’s firecoat so that he could continue.

After an hour, the bar finally gave way.  Giblin and another man crawled out through the opening, but the third was dead, overcome by smoke.

The story of Seneca Larke and the Equitable fire was a sensation.  Within three weeks, postcard photos of the fire were the most popular items on the newsstands.

For the New York City Fire Department, the lesson of the Equitable fire was that it needed specialized equipment, such as acetylene torches, breathing masks and grappling hooks to perform rescues.

The result was the creation of Rescue One and the rescue service, today the most elite civilian rescue service in the country.  The rescue companies were an immediate success.

Futurama -- Rethinking America's Car Companies

I wrote this as a pitch for a film in the wake of the auto industry's near collapse.  The goal was to prod the companies and the public to rethink the future of the car business.

It must have been a rude awakening for the corporate titans from Detroit to find out that a majority of Americans, who wouldn’t be directly affected by their demise, signaled that their long love affair with the car was finally over.  People have been had so many times by bad quality, broken promises of technology to come, lies about the impossibility of meeting government mandates for safety, emissions and mileage that they just said, “a pox on all your houses.”

These passions were unleashed as the executives of the Detroit 3 automakers faced intense grilling at the hands of combative Congressional inquisitors, focusing the world’s attention on the car industry in a way that hadn’t been seen since the days of Henry Ford.

It was high drama as mayors and governors, social service agencies, and millions of people whose fates are tied to the industry waited to see whether Congress would throw them a lifeline.  Ironically, Southern Republicans, who’d received generous campaign contributions from these same automakers, blocked a bailout in both the House and the Senate.  A last minute deal brokered with the help of the White House and the Treasury gave GM and Chrysler a few billion dollars in order to tide them over long enough for the next Administration to tackle the prickly questions wrapped up in the fate of these industrial giants.

The Chinese believe that chaos also brings opportunity and this is where “brilliant dreams are born.” I believe we must embrace this view and find a way for Detroit to become the “Engine of Change” as it once was the “Arsenal of Democracy.”

On the eve of World War Two, Walter Reuther (the head of the UAW at the time) and others convinced Roosevelt that Detroit’s factories could build armaments and be transformed into the “Arsenal of Democracy.”  It was this industrial might that defeated the Axis.  Initially, the auto companies didn’t want to give up making cars but when they were forced to put people to work building airplanes, guns, tanks and jeeps they found they could make enormous profits.  This is the money they used to expand and grow after the War, giving birth to an increasingly prosperous middle class.

We’re in a better position today to tap the industrial might of the automakers to help us fight different foes — global climate change and the perilous national security nightmares caused by our dependence on oil. 

Although continued auto production is necessary in the short- and long-term, we can seize this moment to rethink our manufacturing priorities.  Instead of supporting a simple bailout, we’ll be searching for ways to retool America's auto and auto-parts factories to produce goods that we need, and can sell to the world, in the 21st century.  Choose your own products and industries—sustainable means of transport, including mass transit and high-speed trains; solar, hydrogen, or other green-power infrastructure and consumer goods; next-generation telecommunications hardware, etc.

But it’s not just the automakers who need a plan, Congress, the United Nations and countries around the world need a plan shaped by vigorous input from the public.

Our film will tackle these issues, discover the people who are leading the charge for change, uncover the reasons we haven’t moved sooner, and acknowledge the enormous difficulties inherent in the necessary transformation as we set out a clear path for creating a sustainable future. 

This new vision must go beyond the immediate moment to imagine where we need to be 30 to 50 years hence. We can collaborate again, retool as if we were on a wartime footing and timetable, and lay the groundwork for the return of American prosperity.

If the U.S. auto industry can be steered in a new direction, it will provide jobs for people entering the workforce and for the hundreds of thousands of workers who have lost their jobs, thus revitalizing industrially ravaged communities and restoring hope to people now in despair.  New technology and new opportunities can mean thousands of green jobs in a reinvigorated industrial sector built on an auto industry that can become the engine of change. 

To develop our roadmap for the future we’ll turn the clock back to the 1939 World's Fair and GM’s legendary Futurama exhibition. Here, on display, was a vision of America's postwar future – millions of cars and trucks on sleek, high-speed highways carrying people and goods from coast to coast. Futurama's vision – with a good bit of auto-industry lobbying – became Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, the great "infrastructure" precedent we all love to talk about.

Rather than hanging on to this retro vision of America's future, we’ll fire up the American imagination again and create an equally visionary "Futurama" – a technological, industrial, and social conception of the United States for the next generation.

The clock is ticking and if China and India catch up to U.S. standards of consumption, which experts predict will occur by 2030, the concern over global climate change and the scarcity of every natural resource on the planet will make the tribulations about an auto bailout look quaint. Unlike the financial crisis, which hopefully will come to an end in a foreseeable future, concerns about the environment and our addiction to oil will not end soon.

This is hardly a piece of cake, whether in policy, economic, technological, or human terms. The details of transformation will require careful, multifaceted thinking and enormous resources; and, of course, we all know who lurks in the details. The auto industry shouldn't be allowed to die now; in fact, it is unlikely to disappear even in 50 years, but the transition can and should begin now. Worker and production dislocations could be minimized, as during World War II, by the strong support of government and a genuine partnership among government, industry, finance, and workers.

Our film will help Congress, the incoming Obama Administration and the public get serious about forging farsighted industrial, energy, and transportation policies that address the potential impact of unlimited growth of auto sales globally, our dependence on oil, environmental needs, and the need for a strong new industrial base. We’ll show that it is possible to provide good jobs and social benefits to the widest number of Americans possible. The U.S. government may have told the automakers to come back with a plan by March, but it’s actually time for us to create a roadmap to the future.

 

Too Cheap To Meter: The Top 10 Myths of Nuclear Power

"Our children will enjoy in their homes with electrical energy too cheap to meter.”

Lewis Strauss, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, 1954

Nuclear power was sold in the United States as being “Too cheap to meter.” This miracle power source that harnessed the might of the atom to light American homes and power their TVs was seen as a way to put a happy face on the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lewis Strauss who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, the predecessor of today’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC), spoke of an era when “atomic furnaces” from fission and fusion reactors would provide clean, safe, reliable, abundant and cheap power for generations to come.  It hasn’t been the panacea he foretold.  In fact, it’s been a train wreck of accidents, cost overruns, nuclear weapons proliferation and an ever-growing waste problem that is always on the verge of being solved.

This hasn’t stopped the nuclear power industry from promoting its product as the safe, clean alternative to coal for a green future.  Wrapping nukes in a green cloak and declaring their oneness with those concerned with climate change has helped to sway public opinion.  The banks are still skeptical but the industry, like their friends on Wall Street, has turned to the government for support.  The Bush and Obama administrations have kept the light on for nuclear power with loan guarantees, federal dollars for research and foreign policy initiatives like the treaty with India that forgave its transforming a research reactor into a bomb factory.

The impact on the industry of the Japanese reactors destruction as a result of the earthquake and tsunami may reverse the tide of support built by the nuclear industry.  But trust me they won’t give up.  They’ll try to spin the disaster as proof that nuclear power is still safe and that if anything can be learned it’s that we need newer nukes, with more safety features, not alternatives.  So, to arm the public with some mental shielding from the thought rays likely to be beamed by the misconstruers of fact and swayers of emotion here are 10 myths of nuclear power you need to know.

Myth #1: Nuclear Power is Safe

The experience at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex, the Russian reactor at Chernobyl and the meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States, the nuclear Trifecta, are the most well known nuclear accidents but there have been thousands of accidents and near misses that could have led to a disaster.

The biggest fear, in all of these cases, stems from the fact that a nuclear power plant has about as much radioactivity inside it as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.  There is more sitting in the adjacent pools where the used nuclear fuel rods are stored.  In Japan, we’ve seen what happens when there isn’t enough coolant to cover the fuel rods.  The rods start melting and, in a worst case scenario, the China Syndrome, the core melts down and breeches the containment facility.  The heat build up can stop short of a China Syndrome but can get hot enough to melt the metal around the fuel rods and create a reaction that produces hydrogen gas that triggers an explosion.  Which is what happened in Japan.  Having redundant safety measures, a plan B, C and D, doesn’t mean they can’t all fail.

“The only safe nuclear reactor is 93-million miles away, the sun,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of the nuclear policy research group, Bridge the Gap.

Myth #2 Nuclear power will help us kick our addiction to foreign oil.

Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) on last Sunday’s Meet the Press cited our need to get off of foreign oil as a strong reason for pursuing nuclear power.  He’s wrong.  We don’t use a significant amount of oil to produce electricity in the United States we mainly use it to power our cars and trucks and to a much lesser degree, to heat our homes.  Unless we’re proposing to put a nuke under the hood of our cars this “argument makes no sense” said  Hirsch. 

Of course, if we all switched to electric cars we’ll need power to charge them but this can be provided by wind, solar and other sources.  We don’t need nukes.

Myth #3:  Without nuclear reactors, the US cannot hope to combat climate change.

“It would be like combating world hunger with caviar,” said Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner.  The least expensive and most productive way to reduce our carbon footprint is to be energy efficient not to build expensive nuclear power plants.

“The money that was sunk into building the reactors in Japan should have gone into something that would really have helped us combat global warming like solar or wind power,” and improving the national energy grid so that it’s integrated, said Hirsch. 

We can’t spend money on everything we should spend it on solutions and not on technology that creates more problems.

Myth #4: The US is in the midst of a nuclear renaissance

We’ve had a nuclear bubble but “when builders came to realize the costs it started to dissolve,” said Bradford.

The myth of the nuclear renaissance has been an effective public relations ploy of the nuclear industry but we’ve seen the operators at the Calvert Cliffs, Maryland reactor pull out and the backers behind a proposed reactor in Houston, Texas have also pulled out.  Things are sputtering.

“If this is what the original renaissance looked like then we never would have had Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci,” said Hirsch.

Myth #5:  Without new nuclear reactors, we won’t have enough power in the United States.

Dave Freeman, who calls himself the “green cowboy,” knows something about large-scale power generation.  He ran the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the municipal power department in Sacramento and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP).  He says this is completely false.  The best way to generate new power for the long term is not to build nukes but to invest in large scale solar and wind, coupled with natural gas as a transition in the short term. 

The problem has been coordinating the power produced when the wind blows and the sun shines, distributing the power and storage.  There are solutions to all of these.  “You need to link up the disparate sources to compensate for when the wind is blowing and the sun isn’t shining,” said Hirsch.  He also pointed to new ways that we can store excess energy in batteries or use it to create hydrogen, which can also be employed as a power source.

The problem is “old people have forgotten about the dangers of Three Mile Island and young people never knew,” said Freeman.

Nuclear power is a limited resource dependent on mining compared to solar power.  An unlimited amount of solar power exists, “which would you choose,” asked Freeman?

Myth #6  Why not fund nuclear power just to make sure we do have enough power since there’s practically no risk of losing any money with government loan guarantees?

The nuclear industry has asked for loan guarantees from the Federal government because the banks looked at the risk and took a pass.  With the loan guarantees in hand the companies can get financing and if they default, or walk away from the projects (which is what happened before) the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.  “It’s the same as if you defaulted on your mortgage and the Federal government had to step in to pay the banks back,” said Hirsch.

The problem is that these plants are so expensive, and it’s not clear that they’d ever be profitable even with guarantees, that the likelihood of companies abandoning the effort mid way through is pretty high.  Look at what’s happened at Calvert Cliffs and in Houston.

Myth #7 The nuclear industry’s past problems were caused by overzealous environmentalists, regulators and the public’s fear after Three Mile Island.

“The industry’s problems were the result of trying to build too many plants too quickly,” said Bradford.

The industry couldn’t compete in the marketplace in the US or anywhere else in the world.  This is why it turned to loan guarantees that shift the risk to the taxpayers.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) ignored the environmental concerns of one group, The Mothers for Peace, when it was building a reactor near Diablo Canyon in California.  The Mothers said that the plant was situated on an earthquake fault and the company just plowed ahead.  The Mothers were right and PGE had to go back and retrofit the plant to increase its safety.

“The safety of millions was put at risk to hubris,” said Hirsch.

Myth #8 Nuclear power will be an important source for jobs and economic development.

It’s true that building the reactors does create jobs but these disappear when the reactor is complete.  And there are staff positions for running the reactors, providing maintenance and security but not enough to warrant the high costs and risks. Building an alternative energy industry is a much better long-term proposition that will create more jobs in manufacturing and stimulate exports.  People will need to build the windmills, the photovoltaic cells, install them, maintain them and even replace them as they wear out. 

Ironically some fear that building new nukes will chase jobs away because electric rates will have to dramatically increase to pay them off.  “No state ever created a net increase in jobs by raising electric rates to commercial and industrial customers.  Such a policy drives jobs out of many businesses to create relatively few permanent jobs at the new reactor,” said Bradford.

Myth #9  France has found solutions to all of nuclear power’s problems.

France is pointed to as demonstrable proof that nuclear power can be affordable and safe.  While it’s true France gets about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power and it has avoided a large scale disaster, we don’t know very much about their accident record since its industry is nationalized and run behind a veil of secrecy.  We’ve been told that Japan runs its program much better than France and we've just seen what that means.  One can only assume that their aging reactors are just an “accident waiting to happen,” said Hirsch. “They are just playing a game of Russian roulette.”

As far as cost is concerned, the French pay about 20% more for electricity than we do here in the United States.

Many point to their ability to make nuclear waste disappear into easily stored glass balls while we continue to battle over where to bury our barrels of waste which keep piling up in temporary storage ponds next to the reactors.

“In high level waste they are no further along than anybody,” said Hirsch.  They just dissolve the waste in highly toxic acid and store it in warehouses in the glass.  Which is still radioactive and the glass eventually disintegrates and has to be replaced.”

The famous scene of 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley lovingly holding one of the glass balls came to mind.  “That was just a prop,” said Hirsch.

They also reprocess their fuel to create new fuel but this still leaves, “most of the radioactivity to disposed of,” explained Bradford.

It also adds to the costs of the producing nuclear power and creates plutonium that can be used to make nuclear weapons.

Myth #10  The growth of civilian nuclear power won’t promote the spread of nuclear weapons, or as it’s called, proliferation.

There is no “peaceful atomic power.  If promoting nuclear power you are promoting bombs,” said Freeman.

According to Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC commissioner, the “main obstacle to obtaining nuclear weapons is the material.   Robert Oppenheimer, the father of America’s nuclear program, feared that countries could too easily start with a civilian power program and then build a bomb.  He proposed, that an international authority handle all nuclear material.  Eisenhower reversed course and launched the Atoms for Peace program that spread civilian nukes around the world and taught the basics of nuclear engineering to people in countries like Iran.  This boosted the earnings of the contractors but laid the groundwork for weapons programs in all the countries that obtained nuclear weapons after the first five nuclear powers.  There’s “too much greed and too little fear,” said Gillinsky.  All civilian nuclear programs create spent fuel that can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium.  This is what Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan have done.

It doesn’t take much.  At first you needed a chunk of plutonium about the size of a softball now it’s down to the size of a golf ball.  “If a country has done its engineering it can take about a week to go to a bomb,” said Gillinsky.  “Safeguard inspections are too late.”

Currently there are plans to build new nuclear power plants throughout many unstable parts of the world like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kazakhstan and more.

We need to stop looking at nuclear power and concentrate on real clean energy sources like wind and solar.  But these aren’t really fun challenges for scientists.  Building a solar collector or an improved windmill is boring compared to unleashing the power of the atom.  Especially, dabbling in that chimera, the real Holy Grail, fusion power.  Can’t beat that for a fun brain twister that’s sucked up countless billions of federal research dollars but is still “the power of the future.” While scientists like to do what’s hard, exotic and new, people want and need what’s simple, effective, reliable and affordable.

To paraphrase President Eisenhower’s speech about the Military Industrial Complex, every dollar we spend on nuclear power is stolen from developing real solutions to our energy needs.  Nuclear power, once touted as “too cheap to meter” is now too expensive and dangerous to use.

Many thanks to Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission whose presentation “The Myths of the Nuclear Renaissance” inspired this piece, Daniel Hirsch who teaches nuclear policy at UC Santa Cruz and runs the nuclear information group, Bridge the Gap, Victor Gilinsky, former NRC commissioner and David Freeman, an energy expert who as a Presidential adviser helped to establish the EPS and then ran the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and other large scale utilities.

Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune - New Documentary Opens In Los Agneles

John F. Kennedy brought Camelot to the country, the civil rights movement broke historic barriers between the races while singing We Shall Overcome and folk singers got involved as the bards of hope and change. 

But dark shadows appeared on the horizon.  Kennedy's assassination, the ongoing turmoil of resistance to integration and the escalation of the Vietnam War gave the singers a new identity.  No longer "folk" they were enlisted as protest singers as their voices swirled into the center of the cultural turbulence that roiled the country throughout the '60s.  At the center of the storm was Phil Ochs, a singer/songwriter who's been overlooked by many but who penned such anthems of the era as Joan Baez's signature song, There But For Fortune which is the title of a new feature length documentary about Ochs opening today, March 4 in Laemmle's theaters in Los Angeles.

The result is a compelling film that transcends the story of one person and tells the story of an era.  An era that continues to resonate today and the songs Phil Ochs sang sound as fresh as when he wrote them.

"Unfortunately, so much of what he wrote about is still relevant, " said the film's director Kenneth Bowser, who has been working on this project for twenty years.  "I made this film because I love Phil Ochs.  After 20-years, I'm still not bored."

Bowser grew up listening to Phil Ochs records but was really moved by the singer's commitment when he saw him perform at a benefit for grape pickers organized by Cesar Chavez in New York.  "He (Ochs) flew in from California just for the benefit and the plane ticket cost more than he got from the benefit.  That was Phil," said Bowser.  "His music meant so much to me and his values."

But it took his daughter Samantha, who shared her father's passion for Ochs, to suggest he make a film about the singer.  After listening to the Billy Bragg song, I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night, "She made all of her friends in New York listen to it," explained Bowser.  "She said I have to make this."

At the time, Bowser had only made one feature length documentary but given his marching orders he headed out to California to pitch his idea to Phil's daughter Meegan and brother Michael.

"I liked what he'd done," said Michael, "but it took years and no one was interested.  We stayed in touch." Then six years ago, "I got approached to by several other people to do a documentary about Phil and thought I should call Ken," said Michael.

Bowser was still interested and in the interim his career had taken off in large part due to Lorne Michaels commissioning him to produce a number of Saturday Night Live retrospectives.  "I became the Boswell of Saturday Night Live," he said.  Which was more lucrative than the PBS documentaries he'd been producing.  "I made enough money to shoot the interviews and move ahead," he said.

After banking most of the interviews and tracking down a lot of the archive footage and stills Ken and Michael were still looking at huge costs for rights clearances.

One clip, "where Phil is playing Jim Dean of Indiana on the David Frost show cost $55,000 for less than two minutes of footage," explained Bowser.

What John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," applied to this project.

Michael, after managing his brother's career and serving as a music publicist, had built a successful still photo archive business that focused on popular music icons.  Looking at the music business he decided it was time to sell but the buyer he thought would snap it up threw him a curveball.

Music impresario, Michael Cohl, currently producing the Broadway rendition of Spiderman with Bono, is the former chairman of Live Nation, who'd managed tours for over 150 artists including the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson.  He listened to Michael's sales pitch but took a pass.  A few weeks after the meeting he asked Michael what else he had in the hopper.  Ochs mentioned the film about his brother and Cohl's ears perked up.

"He said when he was starting out he ran a small folk club in Philadelphia and Phil played for him," said Michael.  "He liked his music and Phil as a person.  He wanted to back the film."

This meant, "we could make the film without any compromises," said Michael "He (Cohl) has a thing for superheroes - Spiderman and Phil Ochs."

The result is a film that "shows that change is possible," said Michael.

We see Phil's journey from a budding journalist at Ohio State University to folk singer after a fellow student turns him on to Peter Seeger and the Weavers.  His ability to write fast and his interest in politics combined with his sense that "music could affect change," said Michael.  His passion and his lyrical gifts thrust him into the center of the issues of the day - including the anti-war movement.

His song, I Ain't Marching Anymore, became the anthem of the protest movement.

Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason,"

Call it "Love" or call it "Reason,"

But I ain't marchin' any more,

No I ain't marchin' any more

Copyright Barricade Music with permission

In 1967, he was at the United Nations warming up the crowd with Pete Seeger and Peter Paul and Mary as over 100,000 anti-war marchers made their way from Central Park to the UN to hear Martin Luther King give the speech in which he said, "I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America."

The film makes it clear that Phil loved America too and he provided more than just the entertainment.  We see how he worked with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner to found the Youth International Party (Yippie) as they organized the protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  He sang while the police sprayed the crowds with tear gas and swung their clubs, beating the protesters bloody while they were hauled away.

The cumulative effect of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King and the election of Nixon as the war ground on and seeing the peace movement splintered by the bombings of the Weather Underground took its toll on Phil.

"They raise your hopes and then they smite them," said Michael.  "It was a depressing time.”

In the film we discover the death of his friend Victor Jara, the Chilean protest singer, who was brutally murdered by soldiers after he defiantly sang "Venceremos" (We Will Win) to a football stadium packed with 5,000 people they'd rounded up after the coup that toppled the government of President Allende accelerates the downward slide deeper into depression that marked Phil's end.

As the protest era waned his career had taken a different direction.  "He started to write more poetry and more elliptical lyrics that were less topical," said Michael.

One album from this era, for his new label A&M, Pleasures of the Harbor, was inspired by John Ford's adaptation of four Eugene O'Neill plays for a movie Long Voyage Home, starring John Wayne. 

"In the film the sailor (Wayne) taking respite from the dangers of the sea finds refuge in a harbor before the next voyage.  But you know they're going out to sea again," said Michael.

Unfortunately, his brother Phil became increasingly despondent about the state of the world as his manic depression spiraled out of control and went untreated.

Things might have turned out differently "if only more people had been educated about and aware of the problems of mental illness," said longtime friend Tom Hayden who shared his sense of loss after a special screening of the film at the Grammy Museum.  Hayden said the "stigma" attached to the disease and a lack of understanding kept him and others from giving Phil the help he needed.  "I wish I had intervened," he said, "but I didn't even know the word intervention at the time."

Phil committed suicide before he could set sail again. He left it to others to keep fighting.

"The Wisconsin protest is a start," said Michael. "Would Phil Ochs be playing in Wisconsin? For sure."

Released First Run Features, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, opens Friday, March 4 in four Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles and is booked in over seventy screens across the country.

Poster Girl Looks at the Impact of War on our Soldiers

We hear a lot about supporting our troops but not enough about the impact our endless wars have had on them.  In a short documentary nominated for an Academy award, "Poster Girl", filmmaker Sara Nesson and producer Mitchell Block shine a light on the impact combat had on Robynn Murray whose tour in Iraq left her struggling to cope with PTSD and the thoughts about what she'd seen while serving her country.  It will air on HBO later this year but will be showing up at certain festivals and special screenings before then.  See it.

http://www.postergirlthemovie.com/

Elvis Rocks the Motor City May of '56

An Elvis book I'm writing about a one week period in the Spring of '56 has garnered some welcome publicity courtesy of the Detroit News.

Elvis was wrapping up a long tour and the last legs when he stopped in Detroit for a one night, three concert gig at the fabulous Fox Theater.  Tickets were $1.50 but the steep price didn't keep people away.  The place was packed and Elvis would return six more times to the Motor City.

The book starts in Detroit, follows him to his next stop in Dayton, Ohio and wraps up with his week off at home in Memphis.

Inspired by a cache of never before published photos I stumbled on while researching my documentary, Elvis: Return to Tupelo, I wanted to explore this brief moment in time.

For a taste of what the book will be have a look at Susan Whitall's Detroit News article.

Nixon Foundation Releases Book About the Historic Meeting of the President and the King

Nixon Foundation Releases Book About the Historic Meeting of the President and the King

YORBA LINDA, Calif., Jan. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Day Elvis Met Nixon, a first hand account of Elvis Presley's historic meeting with President Nixon, has just been published by the Richard Nixon Foundation and is now available online http://store.nixonfoundation.org.

Released on the eve of Elvis's 76th  (January 8) and President Nixon's  98th (January 9) birthdays, the book is a trove of rare photos, original documents, and anecdotes from the December 21, 1970 encounter presented in a fun and interactive way for readers of all ages.

Told through the eyes of Egil "Bud" Krogh, White House aide and liaison to the Drug Enforcement Administration, The Day Elvis Met Nixon recounts the surprise of White House staffers when the King of Rock-n-Roll appeared at the front gates of the Executive Mansion to deliver a handwritten letter to the President.