Is America Ready For The Future?

Tom Friedman's column yesterday in the New York Times sets a somber tone as we head into the Fourth of July. He laments the sad state of American politics, particularly in the light of all the challenges we face as a nation:

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry.

“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

His commentary on the lamentable state of our politics is right on. To take only one example, Congress is dithering on reauthorizing investment tax credits for renewable energy, which most analysts consider vital to expanding that industry, even though the credits have wide bipartisan support:

Even though many business leaders have lobbied Congress to extend the tax credits, Senate Republicans say a larger issue is at stake: the fate of President Bush's first-term tax cuts, due to expire in 2010. Many Republicans want to lock those in, and don't like the precedent of allowing some tax increases to make up for the cuts.

The deadlock has caused some friction between Republicans and traditional business allies. More than 400 companies signed a hastily organized letter to Congress urging passage of the tax incentives. The list included AT&T, General Motors, Bank of America, Time Warner and Archer Daniels Midland, along with Cisco Systems and Oracle.

Other manufacturers are growing impatient.

"The debate in Washington has almost reached a theological level, but we're losing a chance to gain U.S. jobs and leadership in a growing field," Morin of Applied Materials
said.

Or consider the sad case of Senator John Ensign of Nevada, whose state has the highest home foreclosure rate in the nation. He's holding up a homeowners mortgage relief bill that would help thousands of his constituents by insisting that the aforementioned renewable energy tax credits be added on to the bill. Both the homeowners relief bill and the investment tax credits have broad support, but Ensign's idea is a poison pill. The Democratic leadership wants the housing bill to be revenue-neutral -- which it would be but for the $6 billion in tax credits Ensign wants to add on.

Does Ensign know he's playing games? Sure! "I think that's a tough choice for them to make," he said, "and that's why we're trying to push them on it."

Here's Washington D.C. in a nutshell for you: kill a bill that everyone agrees is a great idea by adding to it something that everyone also agrees is a great idea, but which cannot fly because of another idea (revenue-neutrality) that everyone also thinks is a great idea. Only in D.C. could they fu*ck up something this badly.

Rick Perry Celebrates Milestone

The Houston Chronicle notes this morning that Rick Perry has now served the most consecutive days as Governor of Texas in history. (Bill Clements, having served two nonconsecutive four-year terms, still holds the overall longevity record Perry will surpass in December.)

Is Rick Perry better off than he was eight years ago? Certainly. He was then in his second year as Lieutenant Governor, his star hitched to George Bush's acendance to the presidency. Eight years later, he is not hitched to Bush's plummeting popularity and the emerging consensus that history will judge him one of our worst presidents. Perry, by contrast, is mildly popular, although his approval rating will continue to decline. He faces what could be a formidable challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2010 Republican primary, although he's stared her down twice before. (I am a member of the "Perry for Republican Nominee in 2010" club, since I happen to believe that a) Texas desperately needs a change of direction at the top and b) Perry will be the easiest Republican to beat.)

Whenever he leaves office, Perry will undoubtedly become a rich man. He's been an effective advocate for all manner of government profiteers, from private prison corporations to Spanish highway construction conglomerates to pharmaceutical companies. He epitomizes, in my opinion, the recessive gene of modern Republicanism's dual fixation on Government As The Enemy and Profit Maximization As The Only Social Value -- government as something to be mocked and ridiculed while feathering your friends nests' with no-bid contracts and thumb-on-the-scale public policy subsidized by taxpayers. In their gentleman's code, the elected officials and bureaucrats who pave the profiteers' way are rewarded with private-sector sinecures in the form of directorships or cushy positions as fixers.

So Rick Perry continues along his path, smarmily criticizing the "waste and inefficiency" of the government that pays $10,000 a month for him to live in a swanky Barton Creek home and biding his time until he cashes in.

Is Texas better off than it was eight years ago? You tell me. Our schools are worse, with the latest financing fix already inadequate and graduation rates declining. Our universities, victims of legislative inattention and malfeasance for a generation, are skyrocketing tuition and fees to make ends meet while Perry readies to do to higher education what No Child Left Behind did to K-12 education. The Texas economy is, Perry says, strong, although that has not translated into a better standard of living for most Texas families. Transportation continues to be a problem: Texas is growing fast and its transportation infrastructure is not keeping pace, in part at least because of Perry's unwillingess to ask Texans to invest in infrastructue improvements. Our prisons are overcrowded and our prison guards underpaid.

Congratulations, Governor. You're doing a heckuva job.

Joe Cocker's Woodstock version of the Beatles' "(With a) Little Help From My Friends" has always been a favorite of mine. The Beatles version, helmed by Ringo on vocals, was a pleasant piece of confectionary, but Cocker's version unpacked the true emotional power of the song and, as John and Paul no doubt intended, extemporized on the true meaning of friendship and the power it brings into our lives.

Finally, someone has captured Cocker's riffs in this captioned version of the Woodstock performance, highlighting, to be sure, Cocker's talent for improvisation but also the simple genius of the song's themes of alienation and intedependence in a post-industrial, post-modernist society. This new rendering of Cocker's groundbreaking performance allows us to fully appreciate the cultural watershed that was Woodstock.

Apropos of my posting the other day about the Republicans' "Drill Now, Drill Here, Pay Less" mass hallucination:

What Happened To You, Ralph Nader?

We hear a BAM.
Louis jerks.
Ordell shot him.
Louis falls back against the car door, eyes wide open, staring at Ordell.
Ordell takes the pistol, works the barrel up higher on Louis' side, right under his arm, and shoots him again.
This time Louis' head BANGS against the car door window. He slumps over, his life gone.
Ordell looks at him.
ORDELL: What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass use'ta be beautiful.

I thought of this great moment from Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" when I heard that Ralph Nader had said the following about Barack Obama:

I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

Concerned, apparently, that his remarks could be interpreted as anti-black, Nader went on to patronize white people:

He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as 'black is beautiful, black is powerful.' Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.

To be sure, the problems of America's poorest urban communities deserve more attention than they've received. John Edwards talked about them some while he was still in the race. And, as Obama has pointed out, he has been talking about those issues. But Nader's attack is just sad and pathetic, and would be laughable coming from a lesser man.

What the fuck happened to you, Ralph Nader? Shit, your ass use'ta beautiful.

Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

The Republicans, from their dead-duck President to John McCain to the zombies who attended the Texas state Republican convention in Houston last week, have a new mantra: "drill now, drill here, pay less." This is the idea that we can reduce high gas prices RIGHT NOW if we just open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and all our offshore lands to exploration by our greedy oil and gas companies.

They are so anxious to shove this down America's throat that George Bush (remember him?) threatened Congress last week: "If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act.” What Bush did not say -- although I would not put it past the pathologically mendacious culture of the White House to do so -- was that allowing ANWR and offshore drilling would do anything to lower the price of gas in the near future.

Last Sunday on "Meet the Press," Senator Joe Biden took on the illusion of gas pump relief from this loony idea, pointing out that the oil and gas companies have plenty to room to dril if they want to:

They're not pumping what they could, number one. This is a gift, a gift to the oil companies by John McCain. They have now leased 41 million acres of offshore leases. They're only pumping in 10.2 million of those acres. Seventy-nine percent of all the offshore oil available off the coast of Florida, into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Coast, the Pacific Coast, lies within those acres that they now have. Why are they not pumping? Why are they not doing this? Why are they not pursuing what's estimated to be a total of 70--54 billion barrels of oil at their disposal right now if they pump? Why are these greedy fellows deciding they want to go beyond that? It's because they want to get it in before George Bush leaves the presidency. It's because they're not pumping the oil to keep the price up. They are not even drilling. So here you have 30 million leased acres they have right now that possesses 79 percent of all the offshore, and they're not drilling. And John says they need more? And it would take 10 years for it to come online.

Senator Lindsey Graham, obviously uncomfortable at being confronted with actual facts, sputtered that no offshore drilling was allowed, even though his home state of South Carolina would welcome that (a statement I predict will come back to haunt him). Biden responded:

Let's get the facts. You're entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. Forty million acres leased offshore, number one. Number two, the first well to be dug from the time they lease, if Lindsey gives them access to more area, it'll take 10 years from the time the lease is let to the time oil comes out of the bottom of the sea in the new leases.

So the gimmick is not a workable one, no matter how much McSame et al. flog it. Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist who's taken a year off to write a book about the green economy, comes along with a piece in yesterday's paper that gets at the heart of how silly and evil this idea is. The whole op-ed is worth reading, but here's a good highlight:

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.” ... It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.

This is a horrible idea that will do nothing to lower gas prices and will delay the time when we actually begin seriously investing in renewable and alternative energy sources. The Republicans should be ashamed for parroting the latest oil and gas company nonsense.

Vote Republican!

A lot of people say the GOP's brand is a little dinged up now but, as these interviews with ordinary Americans show, people still know what the GOP stands for and why someone should vote Republican.

Where Have I Been?

I realized with horror the other day that I had not posted in almost a month, and resolved not to let June 14 go by without something. I guess you could say I'm two days ahead of schedule from that perspective.

The last month has been intense. I am doing a big project on private health insurance market reform for an advocacy group -- lots of research and writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing. Fun but intense, with a couple all-nighters thrown in.

I am also doing a radio show on KOOP, the little radio station that keeps burning down. I am enjoying that immensely, but it comes with its own blog and outreach to the public.

The summer is here prematurely, with Austin recording its 10th day of 100-degree temperatures yesterday. Today is supposed to be #11. As a friend pointed out in an email, it's been this hot and it's not even summer yet!