Obama Series

1^st Press Conference 11.07.08

Immediately after I become president, I'm going to confront this economic crisis head on by taking all necessary steps to ease the credit crisis, help hardworking families, and restore growth and prosperity.

A fiscal stimulus plan that will jump-start economic growth is long overdue.

We will be moving forward in laying out a set of policies that will grow our middle class and strengthen our economy in the long term.

All of it is designed for job growth.

My priority is going to be, how do we grow the economy? How do we create more jobs?

But, understand, the goal of my plan is to provide tax relief to families that are struggling, but also to boost the capacity of the economy to grow from the bottom up.

2^nd Press Conference 11.24.08

While we can't underestimate the challenges that we face, we also can't underestimate our capacity to overcome them, to summon that spirit of determination and optimism that has always defined us, and to move forward in a new direction to create new jobs, reform our financial system, and fuel long-term economic growth.

The key to a strong economy is a strong, vibrant, growing middle class.

Without sound policies in these areas, we can neither enjoy sustained economic growth nor realize our full potential as a people.

So, not only do I want the stimulus package to deal with the immediate crisis, I want it also to lay the groundwork for long-term sustained economic growth.

We've got to make sure that the investments are made to sustain economic growth over the long term.

3rd Press Conference 11.25.08

To design a recovery path for both Wall Street and Main Street, and to put our economy on a path to long-term growth and prosperity

We are going to have to make sure that we are investing in roads, bridges, other infrastructure investments that lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.

Create the jobs that are so desperately needed, help to spur on economic growth and business creation in the private sector.

And part of the charge to my economic team is to find areas where we can get a twofer, where we're getting both a short-term stimulus and we're also laying the groundwork for long-term economic growth.

4th Press Conference 11.26.08

The board will report regularly to me, Vice President-Elect Biden and our economic team as we seek to jump-start economic growth, create jobs, raise wages, address our housing crisis, and stabilize our financial markets.

I've tried to bring together the best economic minds, people who don't always agree with each other but all share a commitment to making sure that we're growing the pie and that equal opportunity is a reality in our economy, that the American dream remains alive.

For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.  Her own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism.

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on the instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice, and scorned those who were indifferent to both.

Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.

Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion as to be so much superstition, like the mumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his youth. When my mother remarried, it was to an Indonesian with an equally skeptical bent. During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school.

Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

In the black community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church wee not so different from the sins of those who didn’t, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation. You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away – because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.

It was because of these new found understandings – that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social injustice, or was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

Hallelujah!!

I – like every politician at the federal level – am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.

It’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. And whether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit.

The spin works precisely because the media itself is hospitable to spin. Every reporter in Washington is working under pressure imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or network executives, who in turn are pouring over last week’s ratings or last year’s circulation figures and trying to survive the growing preference for PlayStation and reality TV. The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal and miscues – the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon standards for judging the truth.

The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.

OWN - POSSESS

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

OWN: to have or hold as property : POSSESS

POSSESS: to have and hold as property : OWN

Law Dictionary

OWN: to have legal title or right to something. Mere possession is not ownership.

[Note how the legal definition explicitly states that possession in not ownership]

Common Axiom: Possession is 9/10ths Law.

SHARE:

MSN Dictionary: to have or use something in common with other people

Law Dictionary

1) a portion of a benefit from a trust, estate, claim or business usually in equal division (or a specifically stated fraction) with others ("to my three daughters, in equal shares").

2) a portion of ownership interest in a corporation, represented by a stock certificate stating the number of shares of an issue of the corporation's stock.

TRUST

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something

Law Dictionary

an entity created to hold assets for the benefit of certain persons or entities, with a trustee managing the trust (and often holding title on behalf of the trust). Most trusts are founded by the persons (called trustors, settlors and/or donors) who execute a written declaration of trust which establishes the trust and spells out the terms and conditions upon which it will be conducted. The declaration also names the original trustee or trustees, successor trustees or means to choose future trustees. The assets of the trust are usually given to the trust by the creators, although assets may be added by others. During the life of the trust, profits and, sometimes, a portion of the principal (called "corpus") may be distributed to the beneficiaries, and at some time in the future (such as the death of the last trustor or settlor) the remaining assets will be distributed to beneficiaries. A trust may take the place of a will and avoid probate (management of an estate with court supervision) by providing for distribution of all assets originally owned by the trustors or settlors upon their death. There are numerous types of trusts, including "revocable trusts" created to handle the trustors' assets (with the trustor acting as initial trustee), often called a "living trust" or "inter vivos trust" which only becomes irrevocable on the death of the first trustor; "irrevocable trust," which cannot be changed at any time; "charitable remainder unitrust," which provides for eventual guaranteed distribution of the corpus (assets) to charity, thus gaining a substantial tax benefit. There are also court-decreed "constructive" and "resulting" trusts over property held by someone for its owner. A "testamentary trust" can be created by a will to manage assets given to beneficiaries.