Final Thoughts for Now

This is the final installment of this blog for now. I found the process of writing it very helpful in terms of reaching a new place in my thinking. Other commitments, unfortunately, do not leave me the time to continue. I do hope to get back to it some day. Here are two final thoughts.

1) The fundamental problem with our democracy is that the citizens have allowed paid operatives to speak for them. These paid operatives are motivated by their need to make a living, not by the needs of the citizens they pretend to serve. They buy and sell anger and mistrust. We can't sit back and allow them to dominate our conversations. 

I'll give my favorite example: Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council. He happens to be part of the right-wing propaganda machine, but I'm sure my Republican friends can provide examples of left-wing operatives. Tony Perkins spent four years representing Louisiana in the U.S. House of Representatives. From there he moved on to lobbying, by getting hired to head the Family Research Council.  He now makes a handsome living recruiting conservative Christians for the Republican Party. He totally mis-represents the positions of those, like me, who disagree with him. He is a person with whom I can have no political conversation. Neither can I have a conversation with anybody who makes use of his talking points. 

I attended two family reunions this summer where individuals of very diverse political orientations were represented. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that we could have constituted an effective congress. We may not have been able to reach agreement, but we would have ended the conversation respecting each other's opinions.

2) Global warming is taking place. The struggle against it will be the great struggle of the generations immediately following the baby boom generation. The situation today vis-a-vis the pending catastrophe of global warming is similar to that of the late 1930s vis-a-vis the pending catastrophe of World War II.  Like WWII, it seems that it will require a Pearl Harbor type incident to bring the Americans into the war. And like World War II, the future climate war has the potential to heal our economy. The sorrow is that our political system is incapable of engaging that struggle now, before the great turmoil begins.

Renewable Energy Means Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

The following is taken from an editorial published by the Plain Dealer written by Myles Murray, a doctoral candidate at Case Western Reserve University's Solar Durability Lifetime Extension Center:

"Recently, a world record was broken during two unseasonably sunny days in Germany when solar power generation provided as much electricity as 20 nuclear power plants running at full capacity. This remarkable event has been generally over-looked by both regional and national media and policy-makers. This solar-power generation accounted for 30 percent of total German electricity consumption on May 26 and 50 percent on the following day. This is a truly remarkable feat, especially considering that Germany gets 30 percent less sunshine than we do here in Cleveland, and less than half of that in many places in our country."

I'll take this opportunity to recommend a book: The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, by Jeremy Rifkin. To be honest, this was not a fascinating read.  But the fundamental idea is vital to understanding where we are in terms of energy policy.  1) Carbon based fuels are in the process of being phased out.  It is already happening and not because of the environmental movement. It is happening because a billion Chinese and a billion Indians are becoming part of the industrial world. I heard a gentleman on the radio telling how 10 or 20 years ago, the Chinese built an 8-lane outer-ring highway around one of their major cities. The first few years there was only a trickle of cars. Today, the highway is bustling. The rural masses of China and India are getting industrial jobs and buying cars and using electricity. The cost of carbon-based fuel will inevitably become more expensive than the cost of renewables. 2) The transformation to renewables will bring about a return to full employment. One of the arguments now against renewables is that the infrastructure is lacking. But if you look at it differently, this problem is our great opportunity. The building of the lacking infrastructure will bring about full employment. Today our government and our country are investing in expensive, and very dirty forms of carbon fuels: digging up forests to get at the tar sands, blasting to pieces the underground shale to release natural gas, blowing mountains apart to access coal. The number of new jobs created is minimal, since the goal of those industries is to make big profits while minimizing investment. The Tar Sands of Alberta are a typical example. The forest is destroyed and the tar sands turned into a sludge. Then the sludge is piped to already existing refineries in places like Louisiana. When petroleum was a new concept, in the 1920s, its development created jobs across the economy. Refineries were being built. Scientists were employed developing new products based on petroleum. The car industry was developed, which in turn spurred the growth of the steel industry. The same will happen when we finally move our investment to renewables. New industries will spring up everywhere, and if it is managed right many of those industries can be new family businesses. Imagine companies installing solar panels on homes. Electricians working on the electric grid. Scientists and technicians perfecting the solar panel technology.
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Secret Campaign Spending in Wisconsin

The June 5 Wisconsin Recall Election was a sobering illustration of the role of money under the current election regime. I’ve copied an interesting excerpt from Democracy Now, June 27, 2012, featuring two contributors to Mother Goose Magazine: Andy Kroll and Monika Bauerlein.


The major issues of interest to me: 1) State politics has increasingly given way to national politics. Most of the money pouring into the Wisconsin election came from outside of the state. This is a national pattern of grave consequence. 2.) Almost all of the money is spent on television, which requires us to consider what it means when the role of the citizen is reduced to evaluating television. 3) The money being spent by the extremely wealthy is not, in general, very much for them. In 2011, Koch industries is said to have had an annual revenue of just under $100,000,000,000.  If they give .1% of that to a political campaign, that would be 100 milliion, more than was spent on the entire Wisconsin recall election by both sides. If the average American citizen has a revenue of $50,000 and gives .1%, that would be $50.

The interview below can be seen online at: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/27/dark_money_inside_the_final_frontier

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s stick with the Wisconsin recall election earlier this month, the most expensive in the state’s history, with more than $63 million spent. Governor Walker, who survived the recall, outspent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett seven to one, close to eight to one. I want to turn to an ad that was bankrolled by this secretive Virginia-based organization called the Coalition for American Values.

KAREN: I didn’t vote for Governor Walker.
LINDA: I did not vote for Scott Walker.
TIM: I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, Joel, but I’m definitely against this recall.
JIM: Recall isn’t the Wisconsin way.
KAREN: There’s a right way. There’s a wrong way. And I just—I think this is the wrong way.
JIM: I elected him to do a job.
BOB: Let him serve it out.
BOB: Living in a democracy, you have to have faith in who the people elect.
CHAD: I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, but I’m against the recall.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is an ingenious ad, because I’m sure they did some kind of focus groups or polling, and they saw that Walker was not popular in Wisconsin. But they realized they could raise the issue of the recall being undemocratic. You know, there was an election, someone was elected, let him serve out his time. Andy Kroll, talk about who it was that bankrolled this.
ANDY KROLL: I wish I could tell you exactly who it was, because I—but I still don’t know. The group behind it was called the Coalition of American Values, which it does really not get more generic than, I guess, Americans for a Better America. What I found—so this ad comes out. As you mentioned, it really does have a potent message. And in retrospect, you know, or in hindsight, we now know that it was incredibly potent, because exit polls showed that a lot of the people who voted for Walker were really voting—you know, were voting on discontent over the recall itself. So, I start digging into this group, find that their address in Milwaukee, in the state, is a mailbox, essentially, and that their office—they have another office in Virginia, and that’s a UPS store box. And so, there is no home address or home office. The treasurer, as far as I could tell, and we could never actually pin this down, was a gentleman named Brent Downs, who appeared to be a recent graduate of a university in Milwaukee, didn’t answer phone calls, didn’t reply to emails.
And what brought them to my attention was not only were they running this ad and spending six figures on this ad around the state, they had not filed a single report with a state disclosing their spending. I mean, it’s one thing to just funnel money through an incorporation—an incorporated entity in Virginia into Milwaukee, into Wisconsin, and not tell us where your money came from, and they can legally do that with the weird way that campaign finance law works in Wisconsin post-Citizens United, but we also had no idea what they were spending. And I raised this with the elections watchdog in Wisconsin. And not only had this group not disclosed its donors, but they had not even filed a report on their spending, as required. This is what brought them to my attention before the election. They said they were going to fix it. They still hadn’t.
And so, what you—you know, the takeaway here is you have Wisconsinites who are completely in the dark about a group called the Coalition for American Values, running ads in their state, telling them that this recall is bad; not only do they not know who the donors are, based on our tattered campaign finance system, but they also don’t know how much this group is spending, really, and where, as the group is required to disclose. And so, it was just a—it was a really, really disturbing glimpse into how dark money can come into a state election and put out this message, and surely have an impact on voters, and keep those same voters entirely in the dark about how much is being spent, who’s spending it, and just who the heck is behind this group in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, reporter for Mother Jones magazine, and co-editor Monika Bauerlein. Andy’s new cover story is called "Follow the [Dark] Money." We’ll continue our conversation after break.

There is presently an act in congress, the Disclose Act, that would require that the the true and complete identity of the authors of political ads be made readily available to the public.  Our congress has so far refused to pass it.