In his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, Al Gore sets out in stunning detail the many sides of the climate crisis and the challenges is poses, writing that “we must recognize the necessity of concerted global action.”

Gore makes it clear that solving a problem of such enormity will require big action on many levels, compelling ambitious government legislation and unprecedented global cooperation. But that doesn’t mean that individuals can’t play a part. In fact, they should do so without delay.

In 2006, Gore founded the Alliance for Climate Change, a coalition of scientists, activists and policymakers dedicated to finding solutions to the climate change crisis. The group subsequently launched the We Campaign, which is aimed directly at spurring individuals to mobilize to combat climate change. Read More

In Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell tells the story of America’s love affair with low cost. That story traces an arc from a time, in the 19th Century, when quality and craftsmanship were considered more important than low price, per se, through to the present day, when our fixation on cheap almost for cheap’s sake has come to define a large part of our culture. Ruppel Shell’s story is also one of business innovation; from the seasonal sale to the shopping cart and the bar code, new tools and technologies have reshaped the way we shop, always in the direction of higher volume and lower price. Here, drawn from details recounted in Cheap, is a timeline of American discount culture.

1875: John Wanamaker opens the first major department store in Philidelphia and later opens a larger store in Manhattan. The retailer buys in bulk and sells cheaper than local merchants, driving his competition out of business. Wanamaker introduces the White Sale, selling linens and other white products for just above wholesale price, and also uses price tags to fix an upper limit on prices and negate haggling.

1880s: Frank W. Woolworth opens “five-and-dime” shops. Woolworth arranges bins and shelves for self-service, doing away with the need for sales clerks. He nabs bargains on cheap goods made in Europe until WWI hinders the trade, then opens his own low-cost manufacturing factories in the U.S.

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With all the weighty talk these days of troop levels, economic stimulus and health care reform, it is slightly surreal to recall a time not long ago when super delegates and Ohio plumbers dominated the headlines.

Yet as former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe illustrates in his new book The Audacity to Win, the 2008 presidential race left a deep imprint on American politics that won’t soon be forgotten. So with Obama’s stirring election victory in the rearview, we th0ught it would be fun to test your memory of the historic campaign. Take a shot at our brief quiz based on Plouffe’s new book to see how much you recall.

Hendrik Hertzberg dropped by PBC recently to talk about his new book Obamanos: The Birth of a New Political Era, a collection of his New Yorker commentaries on the historic 2008 presidential race, and how he thinks Obama and his administration is doing after almost a year in office. In this excerpt from our interview, Hertzberg, still a fervent Obama supporter and largely pleased with what he’s seen so far, considers what it will mean if, contrary to expectations and form to date, Obama’s presidency ultimately proves a failure. (We’ll have a video of the interview up in the next few days.)

Suppose Obama is a failure.  Suppose we don’t get any real change and suppose the country reverts to a reactionary defensive crouch after Obama, what’s that going to show?  I hope that it will show that Obama failed, that it was his fault somehow, because that would be a very unscary conclusion to come to, comparatively speaking.

But I’m more inclined to think a little more apocalyptically in the sense that right now this is about as good as it’s going to get in American politics from the point of view of somebody who has the beliefs that I do.  We have a president who on the whole I think, we’re not going to do better than.  There is a fairly, reasonably large Democratic majority in the House and the Senate.  Not a decisive one because of those pesky 60 votes in the Senate, but a bigger one than there’s apt to be for the next generation maybe.  So if that’s not enough, then let’s hope that the results can be blamed on mistakes by people that should have been avoided.

But if Obama and the Democrats just make the usual number of human mistakes or let’s say half the usual number of mistakes and everything still goes wrong, that won’t be a failure of theirs, that will be a failure of our system.  And the only upside I can see to it is that then we might have to start looking hard at our system.  And that’s been one of my themes.  That’s one of my themes in this book, it’s one of the themes in everything I write, that our political system–and I don’t mean, you know, that the capitalists run everything or that money governs or any of that stuff–I mean the mechanics of a hydra-headed federal system where there is no responsible single government that you can hold accountable; that  power–state power, government power, i.e., the power of the people through democratic processes–is so fragmented that it’s vulnerable to all kinds of special interests and veto points that make it impossible, even with the best of intentions and the best of abilities, to get done what needs to get done. If Obama and Obamaism turns out to be a failure, then we better start rewriting our constitution and getting ourselves a real representative democracy.

When Google launched its Google News service in 2001 – which uses algorithms to feed in links to news stories on the web, along with a sizable blurb – it caused an uproar from traditional media outlets.

The controversy is recounted in Ken Auletta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, which illustrates the tensions Google has long had with traditional media. The author writes that newspapers claimed Google was presenting their content as its own and “fretted that Google was depriving them of compensation for their content.” The Associated Press even threatened to sue before striking a deal with Google out of court.

Now, one media titan is stepping up the battle. Rather than bicker with the Google News model or try to fight it in court, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch – whose media properties include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and several UK publications – has decided to simply block his content from Google’s reach.

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Bill McKibben on Climate Change

The Tishman Environment and Design Center presents an evening with Bill McKibben, a noted author and environmentalist who speaks to The New School community about the consequences of climate warming, both regional and global, and the need for immediate action to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Fora TV)

* Related Title: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore

PLUS: Bill McKibben Reviews Our Choice by Al Gore for Progressive Book Club here.

The Journey of the American Woman

Christine Stansell reviews Gail Collins’ new book, which tells the story of American women since the 1950s, writes Christine Stansell—and shows us that the depressing mess left when an old order crumbles is still preferable to the tidiness of a once-immovable status quo. (The Daily Beast)

* Related Title: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins

PLUS: Elaine Showalter reviews When Everything Changed by Gail Collins for Progressive Book Club here.

Too Big to Fail

The Foreign Policy Association hosts Andrew Ross Sorkin, the award-winning chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, columnist and assistant editor of business and finance news at The New York Times, to talk about his new book, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System–and Themselves. (Fora TV)

* Related Title: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Three Top Advisors Agree on Afghanistan Strategy; Obama Still Deliberating

“He’s simply not convinced yet that you can do a lasting counterinsurgency strategy if there is no one to hand it off to.”

- A participant in White House deliberations over Afghanistan strategy. The New York Times reports today that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are in broad agreement on a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops, but that President Obama remains doubtful about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy. (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich.

Senate Financial Reform Plan Shrinks Fed Role

“We saw over the last number of years when they took on consumer protection responsibilities and the regulation of bank holding companies, it was an abysmal failure.”

- Sen. Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping regulatory reform bill that would strip the Federal Reserve of nearly all of its power to oversee banks. Dodd’s plan is at odds with the Obama administration’s, which sees a big role for the Fed. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Catholic Bishops Shape Health Reform Bill

“The Catholic Church used their power — their clout, if you will — to influence this issue. They had to. It’s a basic teaching of the religion.”

- Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., a leading abortion foe and architect of the health measure’s restrictions. Catholic bishops have emerged as a formidable force in the health care overhaul fight, using their sway to get strong abortion restrictions into the House bill. (Associated Press)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

It’s easy to forget now, but Barack Obama overcame impossibly long odds to win the presidency in 2008. First, he faced the undisputed heavyweight of Democratic politics, Hillary Clinton; then he squared off against John McCain, a bona fide war hero with bipartisan appeal. And he beat them both, handily.

Credit goes to the man himself, of course, but also to a brilliant political strategy devised by David Plouffe and David Axelrod that shredded much of the conventional wisdom about how campaigns should be run. Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager , provides an intimate look at how Team Obama pulled it off in his new book, The Audacity to Win.

From the outset, the Obama team resolved to build a broad grassroots campaign that harnessed new media technology and brought in voters who hadn’t previously been engaged politically. They also jettisoned the narrow swing-state focus of recent campaigns. Writes Plouffe:

Nothing was more important to us strategically than having a wide playing field. This was my goal from Day One. We did not want to wake up on the morning of November 4 dependent on one state, as Kerry was on Ohio in 2004 and to a lesser extent Gore was on Florida in 2000. We wanted to have a wide set of targets so that we could lose some and still win the presidency.

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Google and the Next Internet
Google CEO Eric Schmidt joins WBUR’s Tom Ashbrook, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Nov. 5, in a discussion about Google and the next Internet. (The event was part of a memorial for Michael Hammer, an MIT computer science professor who died in September.) (WBUR.org)

Henry Waxman: How Congress Really Works
California Congressman Henry Waxman, who for three decades has served as a watchdog for citizens and consumers, and is now Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, talks about how Congress works and how it can work better, at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, Washington, DC (Fora TV).