Governor Brown Strengthens California’s Climate Ties with Europe, Blasts “Denialists”

11-8-2017

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BRUSSELS, Belgium – In forceful remarks before the Baden-Württemberg State Parliament and nearly three hours of wide-ranging debate and dialogue with members of the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today forged closer ties with European leaders committed to climate action and blasted the “denialists” who continue to reject the scientific consensus on global warming.

“We have to wake up – wake up Europe, wake up America, wake up the whole world to realize we have a common destiny and we are all human beings on this one planet,” said Governor Brown in his address to the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg, co-founder of the Under2 Coalition. “This is daunting but it’s also an opportunity to pull people together.”

From Stuttgart, Germany, the Governor traveled to Brussels, Belgium, where he joined dozens of members of the European Parliament’s top climate and environmental committee and the leaders of the Parliament’s political parties for more than three hours of debate and discussion on climate change, its impacts, and opportunities for further collaboration. During the final hour of the exchange, the Governor confronted several members that used their remarks to openly question the science of climate change.

“The truth is that any kind of catalogue of the scientific community indicates that climate change is real, it’s having impacts. Even the Trump administration couldn’t, with a straight face, curb a report that underscores the very opposite of what you denialists have expressed here,” said Governor Brown during the discussion with the European Parliament Conference of Presidents. “With the denialists getting more attention, the people, instead of growing in their skepticism, are growing in their conviction that climate change and global warming are real matters – and we have to deal with them.”

Tomorrow, the Governor will conclude his visit to Brussels with a moderated conversation hosted by the German Marshall Fund. Later this week, the Governor will travel to Oslo, Norway, where he will meet with the country’s Prime Minister and Environment Minister and convene scientists from the world’s top national science academies before arriving in Bonn, Germany, where he will serve as Special Advisor for States and Regions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23).

Yesterday, Governor Brown met with Baden- Württemberg Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann in Stuttgart, Germany after delivering opening remarks at a high-level conference on clean energy organized by the European Parliament and European Commission and meeting with European Parliament President Antonio Tajani and the European Union’s top representatives at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23) – Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Caüete and European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Marosh Shefčovič. Over the weekend, the Governor delivered keynote remarks at a symposium on climate change hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, where he called on global faith leaders to help awaken the world to the threat of toxic carbon pollution.

Governor Brown was named Special Advisor for States and Regions in June by Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama – president of COP23. The Governor continues to build strong coalitions of partners committed to curbing carbon pollution in both the United States through the U.S. Climate Alliance and around the globe with the Under2 Coalition, which has grown to include 188 jurisdictions collectively representing more than 1.2 billion people and $28.9 trillion GDP – equivalent to over 16 percent of the global population and 39 percent of the global economy.

The Governor also joined United Nations Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change Michael Bloomberg to launch America’s Pledge on climate change to help compile and quantify the actions of states, cities and businesses to drive down their greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement. In September 2018, the State of California will convene the world’s climate leaders in San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit, where representatives from subnational governments, businesses, investors and civil society will gather with the direct goal of supporting the Paris Agreement.

This year, Governor Brown traveled to China to build closer climate ties with President Xi Jinping, Russia to call for deeper trans-pacific collaboration on climate change at the Eastern Economic Forum, Canada to officially link California’s carbon market with Quebec and Ontario and New York to discuss subnational climate action with the UN Secretary-General and open Climate Week NYC 2017.

Photo captions:
1.) Governor Brown delivers remarks at European Parliament climate dialogue.
2.) Governor Brown at European Parliament climate dialogue.
3.) Governor Brown addresses Baden-Württemberg State Parliament.
4.) Governor Brown at Baden-Württemberg State Parliament.
5.) Governor Brown at European Parliament climate dialogue.

For high-resolution copies of these photos, contact Danella Debel at Danella.Debel@gov.ca.gov.

Anti-Trump US coalition tells UN climate talks: ‘we’re still in’

ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT ALISTER DOYLE
Nov 9th 2017 11:30AM

BONN, Nov 9 (Reuters) – A coalition of U.S. cities, companies and other groups said on Thursday that many in the United States remained committed to the 2015 Paris climate agreement despite plans by U.S. President Donald Trump to pull out.
The “we are still in” coalition opened a 2,500-square meter (27,000-square foot) tent pavilion outside a venue in Bonn, Germany, where delegates from almost 200 nations are working on details of the pact aimed at ending the fossil fuel era by 2100.
By contrast, the U.S. government delegation office at the talks covers only 100 square meters.
“There is a tradition of non-partisanship for protecting our planet,” said James Brainard, Republican mayor of the town of Carmel, Indiana, at an opening event.
SEE ALSO: Syria plans to join Paris climate agreement, leaving US in isolation
“It is unfortunate we have moved away from it.”
Trump, who doubts mainstream scientific findings that global warming is primarily caused by man-made greenhouse gases, said in June he would pull out of the Paris Agreement and promote the U.S. coal and oil industries.
The “we are still in” coalition of states, cities, universities, faith groups and environmental activists, aims to show delegates from other nations at the Nov. 6-17 U.N. talks that many Americans are working to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

It says its signatories represent more than 130 million Americans and $6.2 trillion of annual economic output.
Fiji, which is presiding at the U.N. talks, welcomed the coalition as a “perfect example” of how the Paris accord aims to widen action beyond national governments.
RELATED: What President Trump has said about climate change

The “we are still in” pavilion is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Hewlett Foundation and NextGen America.
California Governor Jerry Brown also urged more action on climate change. “Relative to the threat, the urgency is not there … and nobody is in charge. That’s the biggest problem,” he told a news conference in Brussels. Brown travels to Bonn on Saturday. (Additional reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; editing by Andrew Roche)

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Philip Jessup Jr

Partner of 
 Philip Jessup Jr

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The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC) and the framing of Local Climate Policy

ICLEI (1993b) Cities for Climate Protection. An International Campaign to Reduce Urban Emissions of Greenhouse Gases Written by Jeb Brugmann, Secretary General of ICLEI and Phillip Jessup, Director for the Urban CO2 Reduction Project, 15 February 1993 (Toronto, ICLEI) 

These two cities illuminate the policy-making process for global warming at the urban level and the role ‘{at policy entrepreneurs}’ can play at this level. In comparing the two cities, a common model of policy development is utilized.

While pursuing his Ph.D., and for a good time thereafter (1925–1946), Jessup served as a lecturer and professor in international law at Columbia Law School. In 1946, he was named the Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Columbia Law, a post he held until 1961.[2][3]
Jessup served as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) conference in 1943 and the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (the “Bretton Woods” conference) in 1944. He was a technical advisor to the American delegation to the San FranciscoUnited Nations charter conference in 1945.
Jessup became a primary target of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who charged in the 1950 Tydings Committeehearings that Jessup was a security risk who had “an unusual affinity… for Communist causes.” McCarthy wasn’t allowed by the Tydings Committee to outline his case regarding Jessup but the committee did allow Jessup to fly in from Pakistan and give his defense. Jessup was subsequently cleared of all charges by the Loyalty Board of the State Department and the Tydings Committee, and McCarthy was rebuked by many fellow senators and other statesmen. However, in two speeches on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy gave his evidence regarding Jessup’s “unusual affinity for Communist causes”:
1.That Jessup had been affiliated with five Communist front groups; 2.That Jessup had been a leading light in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) at a time that organization was reflecting the Communist Party line; 3.And that he had “pioneered the smear campaign against Nationalist China and Chiang Kai-shek” and propagated the “myth of the ‘democratic Chinese Communist'” through the IPR magazine, Far Eastern Survey, over which he had “absolute control”; 4.That Jessup had associated with known Communists in the IPR; 5.That the IPR’s American Council under Jessup’s guidance had received more than $7,000 of Communist funds from Frederick Vanderbilt Field; 6.That Jessup had “expressed vigorous opposition” to attempts to investigate Communist penetration of the IPR; 7.That Jessup had urged that United States atom bomb production be brought to a halt in 1946, and that essential atomic ingredients be “dumped into the ocean”; 8.That Jessup had appeared as a character witness for Alger Hiss, and that later, after Alger Hiss’s conviction, Jessup had found “no reason whatever to change his opinion about Hiss’s veracity, loyalty and integrity.”
McCarthy’s allegations severely damaged Jessup’s reputation and career .
Nonetheless, President Harry S. Truman appointed Jessup as United States delegate to the United Nations in 1951. However, when the appointment came before the Senate it was not approved, largely because of McCarthy’s influence. Truman circumvented the Senate by assigning Jessup to the United Nations on an “interim appointment.”
Shortly after John F. Kennedy took office as president, the State Department approved the appointment of Jessup as U.S. candidate for the International Court of Justice, a post that did not need Senate confirmation. He served from 1961 until 1970.

SCP4_FN-000011.jpg

LOIS KELLOGG JESSUP, CLASS OF 1920

Lewis Greenleaf Adams, AIA, (1897–1977), was an American architect based in New York City
Adams attended the Groton School,[2] graduation in 1916.[3] earned his Bachelor of Architecture from the Yale University[2] in 1920.[1][3]

There, Lewis Adams was a member of the secret society, Skull and Bones.In a double-marriage ceremony on July 24, 1921, Adams married Emiline Kellogg, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Kellogg of Utica, New York,
and younger sister of Lois Kellogg who was married that same day to Philip C. Jessup, son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Wynans Jessup, of 20 Fifth Avenue.

Charles Seymour (1908), President of Yale (1937–1951), founding member of The Council on Foreign Relations
All of the Lindsay children attended the best schools. John went to Buckley in Manhattan before prepping at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. He then became a member of the class of 1944 at Yale, where he rowed crew and was elected to Scroll and Key. (David Lindsay also attended Yale; he was selected for the more prestigious Skull and Bones, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.) David A. Lindsay

David L. Boren (1963), Governor of Oklahoma, U.S. Senator, President of the University of Oklahoma

Michael Gates Gill (1963), advertising executive, author

William Dawbney Nordhaus (1963), Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University

Orde Musgrave Coombs (1965), author, editor, first black member of Skull and Bones

John Shattuck (1965), US diplomat and ambassador, university administrator

John Forbes Kerry (1966), U.S. Senator (D-Massachusetts 1985–2013); Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts 1983–1985; 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee; 68th United States Secretary of State 2013-present

David Rumsey (1966), founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection and president of Cartography Associates

Frederick Wallace Smith (1966), founder of FedEx

David Thorne (1966), United States Ambassador to Italy

Victor Ashe (1967), Tennessee State Senator and Representative, Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, US Ambassador to Poland

Roy Leslie Austin (1968), appointed ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago by George W. Bush

George W. Bush (1968), grandson of Prescott Bush; son of George H. W. Bush; 46th Governor of Texas; 43rd President of the United States. His nickname was “Temporary” since he failed to choose a name
Paul Giamatti (1989), Academy Award-nominated American actor

https://www.scribd.com/document/44403338/Skull-and-Bones-Portraits

http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2009/11/urantia-cult-is-skull-bones-spin-off.html

Jessup was Chairman of the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR) American council from 1939 to 1940 and chairman of its Pacific council from 1939 to 1942. Both councils were high-level policy-making bodies. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee found in 1954 that:
“ The IPR has been considered by the American Communists and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda andmilitary intelligence. . . . A small core of officials and staff members carried the main burden of IPR activities and directed its administration and policies. Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled the IPR were either Communists or pro-Communists. ”
Through the IPR Jessup was closely associated with Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Frederick Vanderbilt Field and Lauchlin Currie.
Jessup served as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) conference in 1943 and the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. He was a member of the American delegation to the San Francisco United Nations charter conference in 1945. He was also the United States representative on the fifteen-man United Nations committee of jurists that had drafted the World Court statute. Continuing as a technical expert and advisor to various important UN commissions, Jessup prepared the State Department’s “White Paper” on China. Written at the time when the Chinese Communist Party were overrunning the mainland, this report praised the CCP and condemned the Kuomintang forces. Jessup later became one of the early advocates for the admission of Peoples Republic of China to the United Nations.
President Truman appointed Jessup as United States delegate to the United Nations in 1951. When the appointment came before the Senate, however, it was not approved because of Jessup’s openly pro-Communist record. President Truman circumvented the Senate action by assigning Jessup to the United Nations on an “interim appointment.” [1]
Institute for Pacific Relations
Senator McCarthy’s first comments regarding Jessup were made during the Tydings Committee hearings where McCarthy stated that Jessup had an unusual affinity for Communist causes. McCarthy was never allowed by the Tydings Committee to outline his case regarding Jessup but the committee did allow Jessup to fly in from Pakistan and give his defense against charges that McCarthy had not yet even made. Needless to say, the Tydings Committee cleared Jessup as they did with everyone that appeared before them. However, in two speeches on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy gave his evidence regarding Jessup’s “unusual affinity for Communist causes”. They are as follows:
That Jessup had been affiliated with five Communist front groups;
That Jessup had been a leading light in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) at a time that organization was reflecting the Communist Party line;
And that he had “pioneered the smear campaign against Nationalist China and Chiang Kai-shek” and propagated the “myth of the ‘democratic Chinese Communist'” through the IPR magazine, Far Eastern Survey, over which he had “absolute control”;
That Jessup had associated with known Communists in the IPR;
That the IPR’s American Council under Jessup’s guidance had received more than $7,000 of Communist funds from Frederick Vanderbilt Field;
That Jessup had “expressed vigorous opposition” to attempts to investigate Communist penetration of the IPR;
That Jessup had urged that United States atom bomb production be brought to a halt in 1946, and that essential atomic ingredients be “dumped into the ocean”;
That Jessup had appeared as a character witness for Alger Hiss, and that later, after Alger Hiss’s conviction, Jessup had found “no reason whatever to change his opinion about Hiss’s veracity, loyalty and integrity.”
While it may be questionable that Jessup pioneered the smear campaign against Chiang Kai-Shek, it’s clear that he aided in it. There’s no doubt that every single one of these allegations was essentially correct. Solid evidence shows that Jessup was associated with four Communist front organizations. They are as follows:
the American Russian Institute, the National Emergency Conference (and its successor, the National Emergency Conference for Democratic Rights), theAmerican Law Students Association, and the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations. According to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) each of these organizations was cited as Communist front groups at the time of Jessup’s association with them. Although the Tydings Committee did not allow McCarthy to present his evidence against Jessup, the Tydings Committee did refer to some of McCarthy’s evidence that were made on the floor of the Senate. Of course, as usual, the Tydings Committee either ignored the significance of the evidence or downplayed it. It was up to the McCarran Committee a year later to do the real investigating and in discussing the IPR, it stated, “The IPR was a vehicle used by Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives.” The McCarran Committee Hearings clearly indicate that the IPR was more than just a Communist front organization in that there was an active Communist “cell” that put the services of the IPR at the disposal of “Communist imperialism”. And that this was achieved by “manipulating” the IPR’s policy-making officials.
The McCarran Committee reported that ten of the thirty-three individuals whom Jessup recommended as delegates to the IPR Hot Springs Convention in January 1945 have been named as members of the Communist Party. Jessup was well aware that Frederick Vanderbilt Field was a member of the Communist Party, and especially so when Field resigned from the IPR to devote full-time to the Communist front organization, American Peace Mobilization.
Jessup also presided over the State Department Policy Conference of October 1949 that was not only stocked with Jessup’s pro-Communist associates but also, in the words of the McCarran Committee, which stated, “…the prevailing [majority] view at the conference advocated (a) the recognition of Communist China; (b) normal trade relations between the United States and Communist China; (c) encouragement of trade between Japan and Communist China; (d) economic assistance to Communist China; (e) recognition that Communist conquest in Asia was a natural and inevitable consequence of revolutionary ferment in Asia with its Communist nature being incidental.”

Harold Stassen and General Joseph Fortier have respectively testified that Jessup not only ignored advice to disregard the pro-Communist direction of the conference and that Jessup was in favor of recognizing Communist China. The above evidence clearly demonstrates that Jessup was at least a security risk and that the State Department Loyalty program failed to identify him as such. [2]
World Court
Shortly after John F. Kennedy took office as president, the State Department approved the appointment of Jessup as U.S. candidate for the International Court of Justice, a post that did not need Senate confirmation. He served from 1961 until 1970.

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THE OBAMAVERSE

A Small World

by Steve Sailer 

October 29, 2014

 

photo credit: Shutterstock

President Barack Obama

Six years after he was first elected President of the United States, Barack Obama remains something of an enigma to the public he presides over.

Ironically, this isn’t due to the President being particularly reticent about himself. After all, judging from his two books, the subject Obama finds most enthralling is Obama. For example, Obama’s 2012 eulogy for Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the Japanese-American war hero, used 48 first person pronouns or adjectives (such as “I,” “me,” or “my”) to recount how the young Obama had noticed Inouye on TV.

Understandably, Obama hasn’t been in any hurry to answer his political opponents’ questions, toying with them for years over his birth certificate. Meanwhile, few of his supporters have felt much urge to ask him the detailed questions about his background that he’d probably love to expound upon at length. As Obama has explained, being a “blank screen” upon which voters can project their political fantasies has its advantages.

One reason for this obscurity is that aspects of Obama’s personal background are genuinely exotic to almost all Americans, which limits the quality of questions. For example, Obama’s Indonesian connections—as a child he lived in Jakarta from 1967-1971, shortly after the notorious massacre of Communists and Chinese; then in the 1980s Obama came fairly close to marrying a wealthy Australian woman with striking family ties to the highest circles of power in Indonesia—are perplexing to even the best-informed Americans.

Indonesia is an immense country (current population: a quarter of a billion), but it’s culturally remote from America. For instance, there are almost no prominent Indonesian-Americans (the Van Halen brothers, who are one-quarter Indonesian, may come closest). Movies about Indonesian history well-known in the West are limited to two curious ones about the downfall of the leftist ruler Sukarno in 1965 and the subsequent slaughter of Communists: The Year of Living Dangerously and last year’s documentary The Act of Killing.

Democrats, even Obama, don’t find Indonesians terribly interesting. It’s impossible to imagine Obama achieving anything in Democratic politics if he had not suddenly switched in the mid-1980s from what his friends called an “international” or “multicultural” identity to being Our First Black President.

“It’s impossible to imagine Obama achieving anything in Democratic politics if he had not suddenly switched in the mid-1980s from what his friends called an “international” or “multicultural” identity to being Our First Black President.”

And Republicans have generally found Indonesia a frustrating dead end in tying Obama to Islam or Communism. For example, the President’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, child of a wealthy Indonesian family, eventually died of liver failure at age 52, which doesn’t suggest he was terribly devout about abstaining from alcohol.

Lolo worked for an American oil company because his brother-in-law was a high official in General Suharto’s regime that had marched to power in 1965-66 over the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of its leftwing opponents.

Likewise, Obama’s mother’s first job in Indonesia was at the American embassy.

The CIA/Ford Foundation policy tended to be to try to attract everybody in the Third World even slightly to the left of Che Guevara. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama’s maternal grand-uncle, a Ph.D. named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, who worked for the Naval Personnel Research agency on the ultra-confidential Polaris submarine missile project, had vouched for his niece her being a good Jayhawk Unitarian liberal.)

She went on to a long career in Indonesia and Pakistan with the Ford Foundation, which during the Cold War served as the NGO avatar of the liberal American Establishment’s soft power. Inderjeet Parmar writes in The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State-Private Network:

For example, in Indonesia, where ‘anti-American’ popular and government feelings ran high in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ford Foundation played a vital role in building key educations institution with an underlying pro-western philosophy favoring capitalistic modernization and development strategies.

And that sounds like the President’s mom’s career, which eventually focused upon promoting microfinance for women entrepreneurs.

A major American nerve center for waging the Cold War in Asia was the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. Janny Scott writes in her bestselling biography of the President’s late mom, A Singular Woman:

The summer Ann arrived in Hawaii [1960], Congress appropriated $10 million to set up the East-West Center, an institution that more than any would go on, over the next twenty-five years, to influence the direction of her life.

Lolo, an Indonesian Army officer, had arrived in Hawaii on an East-West Center grant in 1962.

Similarly, Barack Obama Sr. had gotten to the U. of Hawaii on another Cold War ploy, the Tom Mboya Airlift of promising African students to American universities. When Barack Sr. got back to Kenya, he too worked awhile for an American oil company. Although his ideological sympathies tended to be with the pro-Soviet Luo tribal leader Oginga Odinga, his all-important personal connections were with the pro-American Luo labor leader Tom Mboya.

Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book The Greatest Comeback recounts accompanying Richard Nixon to a 1967 meeting in Kenya with Mboya. Nixon and Buchanan were impressed by Mboya, but also picked up the impression that Mboya was perceived as too pro-Washington to make it all the way to the top in the rough world of Kenyan politics.

“And Tom Mboya never did,” Pat writes. After Mboya was assassinated by a Kikuyu hired gun in 1969, the final witness called by the prosecution in the hit man’s trial was the dead man’s protégé: Barack Obama Sr.

One of the more intriguing ties the President’s mother had in Indonesia was to Subud. Scott’s A Singular Woman recounts that Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro went to work for a Ford Foundation-financed English-language school at the end of the Sixties:

The school … had been started several years earlier … with the intention of helping build an Indonesian elite. … In 1970, the Ford Foundation made the first in a series of grants to the institute … She was looking for teachers. A half-dozen of them accepted her invitation, many of them members of an international spiritual organization, Subud, with a residential compound in a suburb of Jakarta.

Obama’s mom became particularly close to a Portuguese-American convert to Subud. Scott writes:

Mohammad Mansur Medeiros, a reclusive and scholarly Subud member from Fall River, Massachusetts, and Harvard, whom Ann hired as a teacher, had immersed himself so deeply in Javanese culture, language, and religion that friends nicknamed him Mansur Java. Samardal Manan … used to listen awestruck and in silence, to Ann’s freewheeling conversations with Medeiros. “You would think they were in love, but they were not,” Manan said.

Founded by a Javanese aristocrat known as Bapak, Subud’s theology was a sort of “Coexist” bumper sticker avant la lettre. You could believe in whatever religion you wanted as long as you practiced the addictive group exercise called latihan, a sort of Javanese equivalent of an est encounter session.

 

And did whatever you were told.

While Subud’s lack of overt dogmas sounded low-key and appealing to educated Westerners, in practice it was a classic charismatic cult with all power over the communes in the hands of the anointed leaders. The cult accumulated enough wealth to build a skyscraper in Jakarta and today seems most active in running amining company in Indonesian Borneo.

I only became aware of Subud recently, from a friend who had the misfortune of growing up in a totalitarian Subud commune in England.

While Subud’s most ardent followers lived in communes, its political connections tended to be anti-Communist. Indonesia’s new dictator, General Suharto, publicly backed Subud.

It had been introduced to the English-speaking world in the 1950s by John G. Bennett, who had been a British intelligence agent in Istanbul and then a mining engineer. Subud was also a natural fit at the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii.

Subud seems to have been especially influential among Australian elites posted to Jakarta. For example, novelist / adventuress Blanche D’Alpuget, the second wife of former Aussie prime minister Bob Hawke, was married to an Australian diplomat in Jakarta when she began her affair with the rising politician.

Murray Clapham, a legend among Australian foreign correspondents for his hard man’s role in the 1965 Indonesian countercoup, was another Subud follower. His 2011 obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald read:

 

Clapham appears to have been the model for at least one fictional Australian secret intelligence service officer in the Jakarta of the 1960s, when he was posted there as a diplomat in the Australian embassy. Clapham certainly looked the part and could have walked off the pages of the Christopher Koch novel The Year of Living Dangerously. It was a dangerous time and Clapham went well beyond the normal role of a diplomat in contacting and encouraging the anti-communist student groups known as KAMI and KAPPI. …

Like various other Western diplomats, Clapham was drawn to the spiritual group Subud, founded by the Javanese teacher Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo.

During the later 1960s, Subud became popular among Southern California rock stars, most famously Jim McGuinn, the frontman of The Byrds, who changed his name to Roger at Bapak’s command.

There exists an elaborate conspiracy theory that the SoCal rock scene of the 1960s was a front for the CIA to exercise cultural control over the new generation: the denizens of Laurel Canyon often came from old money (fellow Byrd David Crosby was both a Van Cortlandtand a Van Rensselaer) or military-industrial complex families. For instance, Jim Morrison’s father was the admiral who commanded the fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which you must admit couldn’t possibly be a coincidence (assuming you are as high as the Lizard King).

But all that’s unnecessary: California in the 1960s was full of people who wanted to be hippies without being Communists. Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test argued that California hippies were drawn in two polar directions: toward Ken Kesey’s superhero-inspired “flag-flying neon Day-Glo America” or toward Timothy Leary’s Eastern-leaning Oriental quietism. (By the way, it’s not implausible that the Yale American Studies program where Wolfe earned his Ph.D. in 1957 was something of a CIA front.)

For those “seekers” attracted to the Wisdom of the East, Subud offered a syncretic Asian religion without any worries that you were coming under Chi-Com influence.

The marriage of Lolo and Stanley Ann was on the rocks by the time she enrolled in 1972 as a grad student at the East-West Center under anthropologist Alice Greeley Dewey (a descendant of two of the WASPiest figures in American history: philosopher John Dewey and newspaper editor Horace Greeley  hired Leon Trotsky ). But Obama’s mother kept returning to Indonesia (with the exception of a spell in Pakistan.)

An odd passage in the President’s life was his love affair in New York in 1983-1985 with Genevieve Cook, the daughter of the future Australian ambassador to the United States. She kept quiet about this until cooperating with Washington Post reporter David Maraniss for his exhaustive 2012 biography of Barack Obama. Maraniss describes their meeting at a Manhattan party from Miss Cook’s point of view, emphasizing how pleasantly surprised she was by how both had so many Indonesian connections. But Maraniss pointedly doesn’t mention the names of the people who must have carefully set up the meeting of the two Indophiles, Barack and Genevieve.

 Genevieve Cook‘s   father, Michael J. Cook, had been the number two man in the Australian embassy in Jakarta (and now served as Prime Minister Hawke’s chief guru of intelligence).

 

Genevieve Cook’s  her mother’s second husband, Philip C. Jessup Jr., was the son of a famous Truman Administration  official, who himself was head lawyer for the International Nickel Company. The Washington Post reported in Jessup’s obituary:

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the company, known as Inco, entrusted him to help create a billion-dollar mining and smelting operation on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Was getting Obama and Cook together a Subud operation?

That doesn’t sound impossible, but I haven’t found any evidence to support it.

A more straightforward explanation is that Genevieve’s stepbrother Tim Jessup is an anthropologist in Indonesia who knew the President’s mom.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!                    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!               !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s a small world, after all.

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He talked quite a lot about discontent in a quiet sort of way—balancing the tendency to be always the observer, how to effect change, wanting to get past his antipathy to working at B.I.

“A SUPERHERO LIFE”

The initials “B.I.” in that journal entry stood for Obama’s employer, Business International, located at 1 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Second Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets. Business International had been operating for nearly 30 years by the time Obama went to work there. Established in 1954, its stated goal was “to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways.” What that entailed, for the most part, was compiling and constantly updating newsletters and reference materials for corporations that did business around the world. Obama was a very junior employee, doing research and writing reports.

By early 1984, Obama was absorbed with Genevieve and with figuring out his place in the world. Whatever and wherever that would be, it would certainly not involve Business International or anything like it. He had turned away from the rhetoric of the left, dubious of its practicality and turned off by radical remnants of the 1960s, but was also leery of succumbing to the allure of the business world. Genevieve knew that he harbored faintly articulated notions of future greatness, of gaining power in order to change things. Once, when they were in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, they saw a young boy in costume, playing out a superhero role. They started to talk about superheroes, the comics he enjoyed as an adolescent in Honolulu, and intimations of “playing out a superhero life.” She considered it “a very strong archetype in his personality.” But he was not to be drawn out—he shut down “and didn’t want to talk about it further.”

Wednesday, May 9, 1984

But he is so wary, wary. Has visions of his life, but in a hiatus as to their implementation—wants to fly, and hasn’t yet started to take off, so resents extra weight.

Saturday, May 26

Dreamt last night for what I’m sure was an hour of waiting to meet him at midnight, with a ticket in my hand. Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life—she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat. Made me see that he may fear his own dependency on me, but also mine on him, whereas I only fear mine on him He wants to preserve our relationship but either felt or wanted it to be well protected from some sense of immediate involvement.

Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 Second Street in Park Slope. The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not “I love you, too” but “thank you”—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world. They spent time cooking. Barack loved to make a ginger beef dish that he had picked up from his friend Sohale Siddiqi. He was also big on tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles. For a present, Genevieve bought him an early edition ofThe Joy of Cooking. They read books together and talked about what they had read. For a time they concentrated on black literature, the writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ntozake Shange.

If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. Hasan Chandoo had moved back from London and taken a place in a converted warehouse on the waterfront below Brooklyn Heights. Wahid Hamid, starting a rise up the corporate ladder that would take him to the top of PepsiCo, lived on Long Island with his wife. Sohale Siddiqi was part of the crowd, along with Beenu Mahmood. It was a movable feast, and invariably a matter of bounty and excess, friends losing themselves in food and conversation. Barack for the most part declined alcohol and drugs. “He was quite abstemious,” Genevieve said. She enjoyed the warmth of the gatherings, but was usually ready to go home before him. He was pushing away from the Pakistanis, too, politely, for a different reason, she thought. He wanted something more.

Beenu Mahmood saw a shift in Obama that corresponded to Genevieve’s perceptions. He could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American. For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. He was one of them, in that sense. But to get to where he wanted to go he had to change.

Mahmood remembered that “for a period of two or three months” Obama “carried and at every opportunity read and reread a fraying copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It was a period during which Barack was struggling deeply within himself to attain his own racial identity, and Invisible Manbecame a prism for his self-reflection.” There was a riff in that book that Mahmood thought struck close to the bone with Obama. The narrator, an intelligent black man whose skills were invisible to white society, wrote: “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.” His friend Barack, Mahmood thought, “was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world. [That] was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”

Obama disciplined himself in two activities—writing and running. When he was on the Upper West Side, he would run in Riverside Park. When he was in Brooklyn, he would run in Prospect Park. He was what Genevieve called “a virtuous daily jogger,” and that was one of the differences between them. For weeks that summer, Genevieve challenged Barack to a footrace. Not long-distance but a sprint. If they sprinted, she insisted, she would beat him. Barack kept putting it off. “His response was merry disbelief,” Genevieve recalled. “By merry I don’t mean he laughed at me, though he was amused. He had this way … where he inhabits a mocking space—it’s sort of a loving mocking—as if to imply ‘Ah, the frailties and tendencies we all have to be delusional, self-deceiving, preposterous even, but you are cute, and I like you better for it.’ ” Finally, he relented. They picked a day, went to the park, and chose a walkway lined by lampposts for the dash. Her journal entry:

On Sunday Barack and I raced, and I won. I ran so fast my body transformed itself onto another plane. We ran, he started off behind me and I just said to myself stay ahead, stay ahead and my body became a flat thin box w/ my arms and legs coming each precisely from a corner. And I didn’t know how long I could keep it up, but I was going to try—my whole sight concentrated on the lamp post when I felt him slow and yell you beat me, at first I thought he was giving up, but then I realized he’d meant the lamp post on the left and I’d really won! The feel of the race was exhilarating, but I didn’t feel very victorious. Barack couldn’t really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it all weekend, I think. He was more startled to discover that I had expected to win than anything else. Anyway, later in the shower (before leaving to see The Bostonians) I told him I didn’t feel that good about winning, and he promptly replied probably cos of feelings of guilt about beating a man. In which case, no doubt, he’d already discovered the obverse feelings about being beaten by a woman. Nevertheless, it was a good metaphor for me, despite, as I confessed to Barack, that in some ways it would have appeased some aspect of my self-image to have tried and lost. But I didn’t; I won.

THE DREAM

Kenya had been weighing on Obama’s mind since the death of his father, and he talked to Genevieve about wanting to visit his family in Kenya. On one occasion he had a vivid dream about his father. It was a dream of a distant place and the lost figure brought back to life, a vision that later inspired his memoir’s title. In this dream, as he recounted it in Dreams from My Father, Barack rode a bus across a landscape of “deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky” until he reached a jail cell and found his father before him “cloth wrapped around his waist.” The father, slender, with hairless arms, saw his son and said, “Look at you, so tall—and so thin. Gray hairs, even,” and Obama approached him and hugged him and wept as Barack Hus­sein Obama Sr. said the words Barack Hussein Obama II would never hear in real life—“Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I love you.”

Genevieve recalled the morning he awoke from that dream. “I remember him being just so overwhelmed, and I so badly wanted to fix him, help him fix that pain. He woke up from that dream and started talking about it. I think he was haunted.”

Genevieve and Barack talked about race quite often, as part of his inner need to find a sense of belonging. She sympathized and encouraged his search for identity. If she felt like an outsider, he was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? He confessed to her that at times “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” At some point that summer she realized that, “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black.”

Early in Barack’s relationship with Genevieve, he had told her about “his adolescent image of the perfect ideal woman” and how he had searched for her “at the expense of hooking up with available girls.” Who was this ideal woman? Genevieve conjured her in her mind, and it was someone other than herself. She wrote, “I can’t help thinking that what he would really want, be powerfully drawn to, was a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well-­experienced—a black woman I keep seeing her as.”

In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend.

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

None of this happened with Genevieve. She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?”

Obama wrote another scene into his memoir to serve a dual purpose, exposing what he saw as a cultural gap with Genevieve. He described how his New York girlfriend finally persuaded him to go with her to the family’s country estate in Norfolk, in northwestern Connecticut, for a weekend.

The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house. He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Ken­ya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.

The differences in this case between Barack’s portrayal and Genevieve’s recollections are understandable matters of perspective. It was her stepfather’s place. They rode the Bonanza bus up from New York and got off at the drugstore in Norfolk. It was indeed a beautiful autumn weekend, though colder than expected, and Obama complained about it. He did not bring warm enough clothes, so he had to borrow a woolen shirt from Genevieve. The Jessup property was 14 acres, with woods, brook, and pond. The library was exactly as he described it, cluttered with photographs and memorabilia of the grandfather’s distinguished career. The family mostly watched the evening news in there, and played charades.

From the distance of decades, in reading the memoir, what struck Genevieve most was Obama’s description of the gravity of that library, and the vast distance between their worlds, and his conviction that he alone was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. She felt as estranged from that milieu as he did, and he knew it, and over the ensuing decades it was Barack, not Genevieve, who would move closer to presidents, diplomats, and industrialists, the world of an insider. “The ironic thing,” she noted, “is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”

“I PUSHED HER AWAY”

Genevieve had started teaching at P.S. 133, on Butler Street in Park Slope, that fall of 1984. She had fretted about it all of the previous summer, and now that she was in the classroom it proved even more difficult than she had anticipated. She confided to Barack one day that she had mentioned the idea of leaving to a colleague, who told her that if she stayed she would end up with a nice pension. “That was the only time he raised his voice and got really, really upset with me,” she recalled. “He went berserk about the trade-offs he saw his grandparents make for some supposed safety net at the ex­pense of something He meant at the expense of their souls.”

That was something Obama, in his own self-assessment, deeply wanted to avoid. He said he would never keep a job just for security. In early December, after one year at Business International, he quit. He also left the apartment on 114th Street and moved in with Genevieve. It was to be a temporary arrangement until he left for Hawaii over the Christmas holidays. When he returned, he would find another place of his own, he said. Their time living together did not go well.

Monday, December 10

After a week of Barack and I adjusting to each others constant presence and his displacement, I expect that this week will make it hard to be alone again when he has gone [to Hawaii for Christmas]. We got very irritated w/ each other Fri. night and Saturday, talked about it.

Thursday, December 13

Induced a flare-up yesterday between Barack and me over a suddenly felt irritation at doing the breakfast dishes. Then I was less than honest when I broached my irritation w/ Barack in the vein of, I’m going to tell you I’m irritated, but only because I don’t want to be, and expected him to just let it roll off his back … living w/ someone, you inevitably turn your private frustrations out on that person, because that kind of projection is such a basic and pervasively influencing ego defense mechanism. And too, as one is so unaware of the other person’s living reality, I had not taken into account Barack’s feeling of being displaced and in the way. In the end he said I know it’s irritating to have me here, and I wanted to say and mean, no of course it isn’t, but I couldn’t. That has been the biggest surprise, that rather than enjoying his extended presence like a very long weekend, as I think I thought I would, and reveling in the comfort of reliably having someone to eat dinner with, and talk to and go to sleep with, I’ve been …resentful I suppose—no—as he said, impatient and domineering How beneath the surface things are after all.

Before Obama left for Hawaii, she bought him an expensive Aran-wool cable-knit white sweater at Saks Fifth Avenue to replace an old one he had inherited, likely from his grandfather, that had holes in it and that Genevieve liked to wear. He was embarrassed that she had spent so much money on it.

When he returned from his western travels in mid-January, he was still without a place of his own and back in her apartment in Park Slope. He had landed his first or­ganizing job for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit founded in the state in 1973 and inspired by the national organization created by citizen activist Ralph Nader. Obama had focused his ambitions on organizing since his last year at Columbia, while acknowledging that he was not entirely certain what it meant. He was hired at a salary that was barely more than half what he had earned at B.I., and his job was to organize students up on the Harlem campus of the City University of New York, focusing on environmental and student-­aid issues.

He succeeded at the job, by most standards, bringing more students into the organization and rejuvenating the chapter. But the issues seemed secondary to him, and he went to work every day with that same sense of remove and distance that he had carried with him at Columbia. Looking back on it decades later, he said that that first organizing job “had always felt sort of like a tryout of organizing as opposed to plunging into it in a serious way.” When he talked about the job with Genevieve, he mostly just said that it was depressing, which captured his mood much of that winter and early spring of 1985.

In his memoir, explaining his relationship with Genevieve to his Kenyan sister, Auma, he wrote: “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world.” All in the perspective, again. From Genevieve: “My take on it had always been that I pushed him away, found him not to be ‘enough,’ had chafed at his withheld-ness, his lack of spontaneity, which, eventually, I imagined might be assuaged, or certain elements of it might be, by living together. Because it felt so intrinsically to be part of his character, though, this careful consideration of everything he does, I saw it, then, as a sort of wound, one which ultimately I decided I was not the person he would ‘fix’ it with.”

At the end of March, Genevieve moved from Second Street to another apartment, on Warren Street, in Brooklyn. Barack helped her move, then found a place for himself in the 30s, off Eighth Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen. He and Genevieve continued their earlier routine of seeing each other on weekends, but things had changed. By the middle of May, their relationship was over.

Thursday, May 23, 1985

Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines. I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all … how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and “fall in love” with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience.

Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)

A DIRECTION

Obama had been thinking about Chicago since April 29, 1983, when Harold Washington made history, sworn in as the city’s first black mayor. Obama’s hope initially had been that he could land a job in the Washington administration after he graduated, which only showed how unschooled and naïve he was. Not until a decade later, when he was fully immersed in the give-and-take world of Illinois politics, would he learn how crucial it was to have a patron, or “Chinaman,” as it was called in that inimitable legislative milieu. In the spring of 1985—from the remove of New York City, having visited Chicago only once in his life, on a summer tour of the mainland with his family when he was 12 years old—Obama had no Chinaman, but he did have something. He had a telephone call from Jerry Kellman.

The connection began when Obama was at the New York Public Library and came across the latest copy of Community Jobs, a publication of six to eight pages that listed employment opportunities in the social-­justice and social-services fields. One listing was for a group called the Developing Communities Project, which needed a community organizer to work in the Roseland neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Right city. Right line of work. Obama sent in his résumé and cover letter, something he had done many times before with no luck. Two matters left unstated in the ad were that Kellman, who oversaw the project, specifically wanted an African-American for the job, and that he was getting desperate.

Obama’s application seemed intriguing, though it gave no indication of his race. The ré­sumé noted his Hawaiian childhood. The sur­name sounded Japanese. Kellman’s wife was Japanese. He knew that Obama could be a Jap­anese name and that Japanese-­Americans were common in Hawaii. It would take a conversation to find out more, so he reached Obama in New York and they talked on the phone for about an hour. At some point, without asking directly, Kellman came to the realization that Obama was black. It was even more apparent to him that this applicant was smart and engaging and interested in social issues. Definitely worth a deeper look. Kellman told Obama that he would be in Manhattan soon to visit his father, a theatrical-­copyright attorney who lived at 92nd and Broadway, and suggested they get together then. The meeting took place across town and down in Midtown, at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue.

Kellman challenged Obama, throwing questions in his path as obstacles, one after another. Why did he want this line of work, with its low pay, long hours, and endless frustration? How did he feel about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life? “I asked him, ‘Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to organize? You graduated from Columbia. You are an African-American when corporations are looking for people like you. Why don’t you do something else?’ But first, Why? Where does this come from? What place and how deep does it come from? And what I got from him was that the people in the civil-rights movement were his heroes. And I also got from him that his mom was a social activist, an academic social activist, but a social activist.”

As the coffee-shop conversation progressed, Obama turned the tables and started interviewing Kellman. He wanted to make sure that the Developing Communities Project was legitimate and serious. This wasn’t some far-left enterprise, was it? He had moved beyond that, he said. Obama turned his questioning to Chicago and what this disheveled white man could teach him. Kellman wondered what Obama knew about Chicago. Not much. Hog butcher for the world, Obama said, reciting the famous Carl Sandburg line. Not anymore—the stockyards had closed, Kellman responded. Obama mentioned the Cubs, perennial losers, and Harold Washington, the town’s new winner. He pressed Kellman for more observations about the city and the South Side neighborhoods, what was happening with the steel mills, the decline of factory work, the fraying of families and communities. The more they talked, the more it became obvious to Kellman that Obama was his man.

Before leaving New York, Barack spent $2,000 on a blue Honda Civic that he would drive into the heartland to start his new life. He also took along the white cable-­knit sweater that Genevieve had given him for Christmas. It would comfort him in the cold Chicago winter.

Adapted from Barack Obama: The Story,by David Maraniss, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster; © 2012 by the author.

 

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