‘Super PACs’ and More: Politics, Money and Language
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I’m Shirley Griffith. This week on our program, we talk about politics, money and language.
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STEVE EMBER: Two years ago this month, the United States Supreme Court decided a campaign finance case known as “Citizens United.”
The court said the government may continue to limit direct donations to political candidates by corporations and unions. However, the justices said the government may not limit spending on independent efforts to support or oppose candidates.
The court said these limits violate the Constitution’s right of free speech. The majority ruled that corporations have the same rights to free speech in political campaigns as individuals do. The vote was five to four.
The case resulted from a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission by a conservative group called Citizens United. The ruling has cleared the way for unrestricted donations to groups known as “super PACs,” or political action committees. These super PACs are supposed to work independently of campaigns, though some include former aides to the candidates they support.
From VOA News: USA 2012 — the Road to the White House
The effects of “Citizens United” can be seen in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Super PACs have been spending millions of dollars on television advertising. The Supreme Court found nothing wrong with requirements to identify who is paying for political ads. But, given the timing of reports, voters might not know who the donors were until after they vote in a primary.
Newt Gingrich is an example of a candidate who supported the “Citizens United” decision, them became a victim of it.
The next primary is this Saturday in South Carolina. Since nineteen eighty no Republican presidential candidate has won the nomination without winning South Carolina.
FEMALE VOICE: “Ever notice how some people make a lot of mistakes?”
NEWT GINGRICH: “It was probably a mistake.”
Mr. Gingrich became the target of attack ads before the recent Iowa caucuses. The former speaker of the House of Representatives had been leading in public opinion polls in that state. However, he finished fourth in the voting. Ads paid for by allies of Mitt Romney are widely seen as having played a big part.
New York City Councilman Charles Barron, a Democrat, says the situation is ironic.
CHARLES BARRON: “And it couldn’t have happened to a better person than Newt Gingrich [laughs], because this was a person who supported corporate elites having their way and contributing as much as they want to campaigns. Now it turned around to bite him.”
And now a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC aims to bite the Romney campaign with a half-hour film called “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.” The group, Winning Our Future, presents him as a “corporate raider” when he led Bain Capital, an investment company. It says he profited while people lost their jobs in the companies he bought and sold.
MITT ROMNEY: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.”
CROWD: [Laughter]
MITT ROMNEY: “Where do you think it goes?”
CROWD: “Into their pockets!”
MITT ROMNEY: “Whose pockets? Whose pockets?”
ANNOUNCER: “A story of greed, playing the system for a quick buck, a group of corporate raiders led by Mitt Romney, more ruthless than Wall Street.”
STEVE EMBER: On Friday, Newt Gingrich said the film contained mistakes and he called on Winning Our Future to either remove them or not run the film.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The New York City Council has passed a resolution that calls for amending the United States Constitution. The proposed amendment would declare that corporations do not have the same rights as people. It would declare that money is not a constitutionally protected form of speech. Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city, has passed a similar resolution. So have other cities including Albany, New York; Boulder, Colorado; and South Miami, Florida.
STEVE EMBER: Eric Ulrich is a Republican member of the New York City Council. He voted against the resolution targeting corporate political spending.
ERIC ULRICH: “Because it’s just as important, even if you don’t agree with it, as the influence labor organizations and other groups may have. You have to create an equal playing field and zeroing out one group simply because we don’t agree with them just to help another — that’s not fair, that’s not American.”
Some people think the solution is to have public financing of campaigns. Jonah Minkoff-Zern represents the group Public Citizen.
JONAH MINKOFF-ZERN: “Our voice and our vote doesn’t matter the same way that someone who has so many resources to devote to a campaign, whether it’s a wealthy individual or a mega-corporation.”
Last week, the Supreme Court made another ruling related to the issue of money and political influence. It dismissed an appeal seeking to expand the ability of foreigners to contribute to American political campaigns.
The justices upheld a federal court judgment in support of a ban on foreign contributions from all but immigrants who live permanently in the United States. A three-judge court ruled that Congress was acting within its powers when it banned most foreigners from donating to campaigns.
The Supreme Court upheld the ruling by the three-judge panel without further comment.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The United States has a long process for choosing candidates to run for president every four years.
The first voting of this election season took place on January third in Iowa at local political meetings known as caucuses. Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, finished just eight votes ahead of former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.
Iowa traditionally holds the first caucuses, while New Hampshire holds the first primary election. In primaries in other states, voters who are registered with a political party can only vote for candidates from that party. But in some states, including New Hampshire, people can vote in primaries even if they are not registered with a party.
Professor Candice Nelson at American University in Washington is an expert on elections.
CANDICE NELSON: “The purpose of the primary season is to enable candidates to introduce themselves to the voters, to let the voters get to know the candidates, to think about the candidates over the course of three or four months.”
STEVE EMBER: Many of the people who attend campaign rallies and other events do not just want to shake hands with a candidate. They want answers on issues. Phil Elliott is a political reporter with the Associated Press.
PHIL ELLIOTT: “They go to these events. They pack the coffee shops. They wait for hours to meet the candidates and ask them very serious and substantive questions.”
The traditional period of three or four months when states hold primaries and caucuses has been shrinking in recent presidential elections. States have been setting earlier and earlier dates in hopes of gaining greater visibility and power in deciding a party’s nominee.
Some people think all fifty states should hold their primaries or caucuses on the same day — a so-called national primary.
Mark Rom is a political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington.
MARK ROM: “The main advantage of a national primary is that the voters, the votes from individuals across the nation, would count equally toward choosing the presidential candidates. That would be a good thing. The bad thing about a national primary is it would give special advantages to those who have raised the most money, and those who have the highest popularity when the race starts.”
During the primary season, people are choosing a candidate but really they are voting for delegates for that candidate. The idea is that the candidate with the most delegates becomes the party’s nominee. But the nominee is not officially chosen until the delegates gather for the party’s national convention.
The conventions takes place about two months before the general election in early November. The Republican National Convention will take place in the Tampa Bay area in Florida at the end of August. The Democratic National Convention is in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the first week of September.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Twenty-eleven is over, but some of the words that came to define the past year of political protests around the world may live on. Grant Barrett is host of the public radio program “A Way with Words” and vice president of the American Dialect Society. That group chose “occupy” as its Word of the Year.
GRANT BARRETT: “And this was used in phrases like Occupy Wall Street or Occupy San Francisco, or frankly ‘occupy’ just about any place. And this was a word coined by an organization in Canada called Adbusters, which started a campaign last summer to get people in October to protest in the streets, to protest the unfair distribution of wealth and the unfair distribution of power, and ‘occupy’ really has had a lot of legs, as they say — a lot of life.”
Grant Barrett says it can work with lots of other words.
GRANT BARRETT: “And so, in that way, ‘occupy’ has become what we call a combining form. So it can be combined with verbs and nouns and adjectives in order to create new phrases and new expressions that filter throughout the whole movement.”
Activists in the Occupy movement call themselves the “ninety-nine percenters.”
(SOUND : “We are the ninety-nine percent”)
GRANT BARRETT: ” And there is one percent of the population — the ‘one-percenters’ — who seem to have all the money and all the power and all the control.”
The Occupy movement has borrowed methods and terms from protests of the past. Mr. Barrett points to the use of the so-called human megaphone.
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GRANT BARRETT: “In order not to violate laws about electronic amplification, what they would do is a speaker would say something. They would say, ‘I would like to tell you my opinion,’ and the whole crowd repeats exactly what the speaker just said to make sure that everyone else who is farther away can hear it.”
The protesters have also used non-verbal communication. Crossing your arms in front of your chest is called a “hard block” and means “firm opposition.” Occupiers have also used “twinkling” similar to a hand motion that deaf people use to signal applause.
GRANT BARRETT: “It looks kind of like if you hold our hands up in the air and you face your palms outward and you kind of waggle your hands a little bit, you kind of shake them, that’s ‘twinkling.’ And this is really interesting from a language point of view. It’s borrowed from American Sign Language, because that is the way you applaud in ASL. It’s interesting stuff!”
Another widely used term in twenty-eleven was Arab Spring.
GRANT BARRETT: “In this two-word phrase we have encapsulated, we’ve made shorthand for, a lot of really important history.”
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STEVE EMBER: We had reporting by Peter Fedynsky, Jeffrey Young and Adam Phillips, and help from Brianna Blake. I’m Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I’m Shirley Griffith. You can download texts and MP3s of our programs, get English teaching activities and subscribe to our podcasts at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also join us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. Join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.
Henry Ford, 1863-1947: Life After the Model T
PEOPLE IN AMERICA, a program in Special English on the Voice of America.
Every week at this time, we tell the story of a person important in the history of the United States. Today, Steve Ember and Frank Oliver complete the story of industrialist Henry Ford.
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STEVE EMBER: In nineteen three, a doctor in Detroit, Michigan, bought the first car from the Ford Motor Company. That sale was the beginning of Henry Ford’s dream. He wanted to build good, low-priced cars for the general public. As he said many times: “I want to make a car that anybody can buy.”
To keep prices low, Henry Ford decided that he would build just one kind of car. He called it the Model T.
FRANK OLIVER: The Model T was ready for sale in October nineteen eight.
The Model T cost eight hundred fifty dollars. It was a simple machine that drivers could depend on. Doctors bought the Model T. So did farmers. Even criminals. They considered it the fastest and surest form of transportation.
Americans loved the Model T. They wrote stories and songs about it. Thousands of Model Ts were built in the first few years. The public wanted the car. And Henry Ford made more and more.
STEVE EMBER: To Make the Model T, Ford built the largest factory of its time. Inside the factory, car parts moved to the workers exactly when they needed them. Other factories moved some parts to the workers. But Ford was the first to design his factory completely around this system. Production rose sharply.
As production rose, Ford lowered prices. By nineteen sixteen, the price had dropped to three hundred forty-five dollars.
The last step in Ford’s production success was to raise his workers’ pay. His workers had always earned about two dollars for ten hours of work. That was the same daily rate as at other factories.
With wages the same everywhere, factory workers often changed jobs. Henry Ford wanted loyal workers who would remain. He raised wages to five dollars a day.
FRANK OLIVER: That made Henry Ford popular with working men. He became popular with car buyers in nineteen thirteen when he gave back fifty dollars to each person who had bought a Ford car. Henry Ford was demonstrating his idea that if workers received good wages, they became better buyers. And if manufacturers sold more products, they could lower prices and still earn money.
This system worked for Ford because people continued to demand his Model T. And they had the money to buy it. But what would happen when people no longer wanted the Model T, or did not have the money?
STEVE EMBER: In nineteen nineteen, Henry was involved in a dispute with the other people who owned stock in the Ford Motor Company. In the end, Henry bought the stock of the other investors. He gained complete control of the company.
The investors did not do badly, however. An investment of ten thousand dollars when the company was first established produced a return of twenty-five million dollars.
A few years later, another group of investors offered Ford one thousand million dollars for the company. But he was not interested in selling. He wanted complete control of the company that had his name. In a sense, Henry Ford was the company.
FRANK OLIVER: Henry’s son, Edsel, was named president of the company before nineteen twenty. No one truly believed that Edsel was running the company. Whatever Edsel said, people believed he was speaking for his father.
In nineteen twenty-three, fifty-seven percent of the cars produced in America were Model T Fords. About half the cars produced in the world were Fords. Taxicabs in Hong Kong. Most of the cars in South America. Never before — or since — has one car company so controlled world car production.
STEVE EMBER: The success of the Ford Motor Company permitted Henry Ford to work on other projects.
He became a newspaper publisher. He bought a railway. He built airplanes. He helped build a hospital. He even ran for the United States Senate.
German diplomats award Henry Ford, center, Nazi Germany’s highest honor for foreigners, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in Detroit on July 30, 1938
AP
Some of Henry’s projects were almost unbelievable. For example, he tried to end World War One by sailing to Europe with a group of peace supporters.
FRANK OLIVER: While Henry Ford enjoyed his success, a dangerous situation was developing. Other companies began to sell what only Ford had been selling: good, low-priced cars. Ford’s biggest competitor was the General Motors Company. General Motors produced the Chevrolet automobile.
Ford’s Model T was still a dependable car. But it had not changed in years. People said the Model T engine was too loud. They said it was too slow. The Chevrolet, however, had a different look every year. And you could pay for one over a long period of time.
Ford demanded full payment at the time of sale. Ford’s share of the car market began to fall.
STEVE EMBER: Everyone at Ford agreed that the Model T must go. Henry Ford disagreed. And it was his decision that mattered. Finally, in nineteen twenty-six, even Henry admitted that the age of the Model T was over. A new Ford was needed.
A year later, the Model T was gone.
Strangely enough, people mourned its end. They did not want to buy it anymore. But they recognized that the Model T was the last of the first cars in the brave new world of automobile development.
The success of Ford’s new cars did not last long. After nineteen thirty, Ford would always be second to General Motors.
FRANK OLIVER: In nineteen twenty-nine, the United States suffered a great economic recession. Many businesses failed. Millions of people lost their jobs. In nineteen thirty-one, the Ford Motor Company sold only half as many cars as it had the year before. It lost thirty-seven million dollars. Working conditions at Ford grew worse.
In nineteen thirty-two, hungry, unemployed men marched near the Ford factory. Police, firefighters and Ford security guards tried to stop them with sticks, high-pressure water and guns. Four of the marchers died, and twenty were wounded.
Newspapers all over the United States condemned the police, firefighters and security guards for attacking unarmed men. And to make a bad situation worse, Ford dismissed all workers who attended funeral services for the dead.
STEVE EMBER: More violence was to come. For several years, automobile workers had been attempting to form a labor union. Union leaders negotiated first with America’s two other major automobile makers: the Chrysler company and General Motors. Those companies quickly agreed to permit a union in their factories. That left Ford alone to fight against the union. And fight he did.
FRANK OLIVER: In nineteen thirty-seven, union organizers were passing out pamphlets to workers at the Ford factory. Company security guards struck. They were led by the chief of security, Harry Bennett.
Harry Bennett knew nothing about cars. But he did know what Henry Ford wanted done. And he did it. Bennett’s power came from Henry. The only person who might have had the power to stop Bennett was Henry’s son, Edsel, who was president of the company. But Edsel himself was fighting Henry and his unwillingness to change.
Bennett’s power in the company continued to grow. His violence against the union of automobile workers also grew.
The Ford Motor Company did not agree to negotiate with the union until nineteen forty-one. Henry Ford accepted an agreement. If he had not, his company would have lost millions of dollars in government business.
STEVE EMBER: In nineteen forty-three, Edsel Ford died. With Edsel gone, Henry again became president of the Ford Motor Company. It was difficult to know if Henry or Harry Bennett was running the company. America was at war. And Henry was eighty years old — too old to deal with the problems of wartime production. And Bennett knew nothing at all about production.
So Henry’s grandson, also Henry Ford, was recalled from the Navy to run the company. Young Henry’s first act was to dismiss Harry Bennett.
FRANK OLIVER: Old Henry Ford retired from business. His thoughts were in the past. He died in his sleep in nineteen forty-seven, at the age of eighty-three.
Henry Ford was not the first man whose name was given to an automobile. But his name — more than any other — was linked to that machine. And his dream changed the lives of millions of people.
Some still wonder if Henry Ford was a simple man who seemed difficult — or a difficult man who seemed simple. No one, however, questions the fact that he made the automobile industry one of the great industries in the world.
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FRANK OLIVER: You have been listening to the Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Your narrators were Steve Ember and Frank Oliver. Our program was written by Richard Thorman. I’m Ray Freeman.
The Laser: How the Futuristic Became the Everyday
Teachers: Download a version with English teaching activities for your classroom
MARIO RITTER: Welcome to EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. I’m Mario Ritter. This week, we tell about one of the most recognizable objects in science fiction — the laser. It is one of the best examples of how technology can go from the science of the future to everyday use in a short period of time. Faith Lapidus and Steve Ember tell us about the history and many uses for the laser.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Laser is short for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The idea behind lasers is complex. Just how complex? Consider that it took the mind of Albert Einstein to discover the physics behind the laser.
Theodore Maiman succeed in building the first working laser in nineteen sixty. Mr. Maiman worked at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
A laser fires a light beam. Before the laser, scientists developed a similar device: a maser which stands for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. A maser is basically a microwave version of the laser. Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation similar to, but shorter than, radio waves. The best-known use of masers is in highly accurate clocks.
In the nineteen fifties, researchers in the United States and Russia independently developed the technology that made both masers and lasers possible. Charles Townes was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his students developed the first maser.
Russians Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov did their research in Moscow. Their work led to technology important to lasers and masers. The three men received the Nobel Prize in Physics in nineteen sixty-four.
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STEVE EMBER: The idea of a thin beam of light with deadly power came much earlier. By the end of the eighteen hundreds, the industrial revolution had shown that science could invent machines with almost magical powers. And some writers of the time were the first to imagine something like a laser.
In eighteen ninety-eighty, H.G. Wells published a science fiction novel called “The War of the Worlds.” In it, he described creatures from the planet Mars that had technology far beyond anything on Earth. Among their weapons was what Wells called a “heat ray.” Listen to actor Orson Welles describe the weapon in a famous radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” from nineteen thirty-eight.
PROFESSOR PIERSON (ORSON WELLES): “I shall refer to the mysterious weapon as a heat ray. It’s my guess that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. That — that is my conjecture of the origin of the heat ray.”
FAITH LAPIDUS: H.G. Wells’ description is not too far from the truth. All lasers have several things in common. They have a material that supplies electrons and a power source that lifts the energy level of those electrons. And, as Wells guessed, many lasers have mirrors that direct light.
Laser light is different from daylight or electric lights. It has one wavelength or color. Laser light is also highly organized. Light behaves like a wave and laser light launches in one orderly wave at a time from its source.
MARIO RITTER: You are listening to the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS.
STEVE EMBER: The physics of the laser may be complex. Still, it is just a story of how electrons interact with light. When a light particle, or photon, hits an electron, the electron jumps to a higher energy state. If another photon strikes one of these high-energy electrons, the electron releases two photons that travel together at the same wavelength. When this process is repeated enough, lots of organized, or coherent, photons are produced.
In Theodore Maiman’s first laser, a rod of man-made ruby supplied the electrons. A more powerful version of the flash on a common camera was used to lift the energy state of the electrons. Mirrors on either end of the ruby rod reflected and increased the light. And an opening at one end of the rod let the laser light shoot out — just like the flash ray of science fiction hero Buck Rogers.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Industry put lasers to work almost immediately after they were invented in nineteen sixty. But weapons were not first on the list.
The first medical operation using a laser took place the year following its invention. Doctors Charles Campbell and Charles Koester used a laser to remove a tumor from a patient’s eye at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Since then, doctors have used lasers to cut and remove tissue safely with little risk of infections.
Other health uses include medical imaging and vision correction surgery. Eye surgeons use lasers in Lasik operations to reshape the cornea, which covers the lens of the eye. The reshaped cornea corrects the patient’s bad eyesight so he or she does not have to wear glasses or other corrective lenses.
STEVE EMBER: Lasers have made measurement an exact science. Astronomers have used lasers to measure the moon’s distance from Earth to within a few centimeters. Mappers and builders use laser technology every day. For example, drawing a perfectly level straight line on a construction site is easy using a laser.
Energy researchers are using lasers in an attempt to develop fusion, the same energy process that powers the sun. Scientists hope fusion can supply almost limitless amounts of clean energy in the future.
Lasers have also changed the way we communicate. It is likely that laser light on a fiber optic network carried this EXPLORATIONS program at least part of the way to you if you are reading or listening online. Super-fast Internet connections let people watch movies and send huge amounts of information at the speed of light.
Manufacturers have used lasers for years to cut and join metal parts. And the jewelry industry uses lasers to write on the surface of the world’s hardest substance, diamonds.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Since nineteen seventy-four, the public has had direct experience with lasers — at the grocery store checkout line.
Laser barcode scanners have changed how stores record almost everything. They help businesses keep track of products. They help in storage and every detail of the supply process.
Experts say no company has put barcode technology to better use than Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas. By nineteen eighty-eight, all Wal-Mart stores used laser bar code scanners. Highly detailed records on its products, and how they were selling, helped Wal-Mart keep costs down. Today, Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest corporation.
STEVE EMBER: Lasers are found in many products used almost everywhere. Laser printers can print out forms and documents quickly and are relatively low in cost. They are required equipment for offices around the world.
If you have a CD or DVD player, you own a laser. Laser disc players use lasers to accurately read or write marks on a reflective, coated plastic disc. A device turns these optical signals into digital information that becomes music, computer software or a full-length movie.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Over one hundred years ago, writers imagined that beams of light could be powerful weapons. Today, lasers guide missiles and bombs.
For example, pilots can mark a target invisibly with a laser. Bombs or missiles then track the target with deadly results.
And, yes, American defense companies are working on giant laser guns recognizable to science fiction fans everywhere. But there are technological difficulties. Scientific American magazine says huge lasers turn only about twenty to thirty percent of the energy they use into a laser beam. The rest is lost as heat.
That has not stopped scientists from working to perfect powerful lasers that, one day, may be able to shoot missiles out of the sky.
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MARIO RITTER: Your announcers were Steve Ember and Faith Lapidus. For transcripts and audio of our programs go to voaspecialenglish.com. And visit The Classroom to find activities for English learning and teaching at VOA Learning English. I’m Mario Ritter. Join us again next week for EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English.
