THIS MODERN WORLD

I believe human civilization will likely—despite current appearances—manage to mitigate global warming and survive. I have about ten reasons for this. One of them is that this is one of the few political issues in which the Sane Billionaires are on the progressive side.

Almost all political conflict, especially in the US, boils down to a fight between the Sane Billionaires and the Insane Billionaires. It generally follows this template:

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: Let’s kill everyone and take their money!

SANE BILLIONAIRES: I like the way you think. I really do. But if we keep everyone alive, and working for us, we’ll make even more money, in the long term.

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: You communist!!!

So from a progressive perspective, you always have to hope the Sane Billionaires win. Still, there’s generally a huge chasm between what the Sane Billionaires want and what progressives want.

This is not the case with global warming. Take Thomas Friedman, who is a pure distillation of Sane Billionarism. (And he is literally a billionaire by marriage.) On trade, foreign policy, etc., Friedman—unlike, say, Dick Cheney—doesn’t want to kill everyone on earth. He’s intelligent enough to understand blood is a big expense. However, he wants to keep us all working to make even more money for him and his fellow billionaires, and is certainly willing to kill anyone who gets out of line. There’s a gigantic chasm between this and anything that could be termed progressive.

But with global warming, Friedman is to a large degree on the progressive side. He’s like Marriner Eccles, an industrialist who later became Chairman of the Federal Reserve under FDR. Eccles said this about the Great Depression:

“It became apparent to me, as a capitalist, that if I lent myself to this sort of action [by his fellow businessmen] and resisted any change designed to benefit all the people, I could be consumed by the poisons of social lag I had helped to create.”

Then there’s the example of the National Clean Energy Summit that was just held in Nevada. The attendees were people like T. Boone Pickens, Robert Rubin, a Google representative, and Michael Bloomberg—Sane Billionaires all. (Actually, Rubin may only be a Sane Semi-Billionaire.)

This doesn’t mean progressives will win on global warming. It’s a gigantic challenge in any case. And dealing with it might require so much change that some of the Sane Billionaires will flip back to the other side. But as with people like Eccles, the threat of the Sane Billionaires’ own personal destruction combined with huge social movements can push the SBs to places you might not expect. (Note that this conference got these SBs to the same location as the Vice President of United Steelworkers.)

Thus, we have more wind at our backs than it first appears. No one can know whether this will be enough, even with a huge social movement. And it certainly won’t be enough without a huge social movement. But we’re not necessarily doomed.

MORE GOOD NEWS: Giant evil utility Xcel is shutting down two coal plants in Colorado and replacing their output with newly-built solar and wind power.

link

A Liberal Shock Doctrine
by Rick Perlstein

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.

That is a fact. A fact too many Democrats have trained themselves to ignore. And it sometimes feels like Barack Obama, whose first instinct when faced with ideological resistance seems to be to extend the right hand of fellowship, understands it least of all. Does he grasp that unless all the monuments of lasting, structural change in the American state — banking regulation, public-power generation, Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to join a union, federal funding of education, Medicare, desegregation, Southern voting rights — had happened fast, they wouldn’t have happened at all?

I hope so.

The rest.

When you read the New York Times, it’s often hard to tell whether we’re living in 2008 or during the Chester Arthur administration. For instance, Michiko Kakutani’s review of Thomas Frank’s book The Wrecking Crew apparently was xeroxed from reviews the Times was giving of similar books during the mid-Gilded Age:

…hectoring…highly partisan, Manichaean-minded…screed…comes across as a sort of parody…in love with big government…opposed to all manner of capitalism…strident, impatient…undermines the possibility of a sober, nonpartisan discussion…antiquated…dubious…

Also: god damn that Samuel Gompers!

But this is the best part:

Mr. Frank does not help himself by relying on fuzzy — and poorly documented — illustrations of his theories. He writes, for instance, that in 2004 “a group of the country’s largest companies reportedly paid some unnamed K Street firm $1.6 million to secure a tiny modification of the tax code; once the law was rewritten in accordance with their wishes — and with almost no public notice — they saved $100 billion in taxes, an amount which you and I will eventually have to replace in the public treasury.” He adds that if you do the math, “you will find that the rate of return these companies made on their lobbying investment was some six million percent”…He does not say, however, which companies paid which lobbying firm the money, nor does he describe which modification of the tax code was involved.

This is correct; Frank “does not say” any of these things. However, he does employ a literary convention known as a “footnote,” which directs you to a long front-page Washington Post article which includes all the exciting details.

Michiko Kakutani has an English degree from Yale. Whether her education was a catastrophic failure, or worked exactly as intended, is a judgment you’ll have to make yourself.

Bill Kristol, in the print edition of this morning’s New York Times:

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”

That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.

News story in today’s New York Times, print and online editions:

ORLANDO, Fla. — Senator John McCain was not in a “cone of silence” on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California.
Skip to next paragraph

Senator John McCain of Arizona at a forum on Saturday with the host, the Rev. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church in California.

Members of the McCain campaign staff, who flew here Sunday from California, said Mr. McCain was in his motorcade on the way to the church as Mr. Obama was being interviewed by the Rev. Rick Warren, the author of the best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Bill Kristol’s desperate last-minute attempt to salvage some shred of dignity by rewriting his column for the online edition of this morning’s New York TImes:

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain … may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”

There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.

The only indication that the column has been revised: a small note in teensy tiny light grey type at the bottom of the page which inform us that “a version of this article appeared in print on August 18, 2008, on page A19 of the New York edition.”

BONUS FUN QUOTE from news article above: “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Sure, America’s intelligence agencies concluded last year December that Iran no longer has a nuclear weapons program. But what do they know? Surely the Democratic Party is far more informed about the situation than them, which is why the Democrats refer to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” in their just-finalized 2008 platform:

Prevent Iran from Acquiring Nuclear Weapons

The world must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That starts with tougher sanctions and aggressive, principled, and direct high-level diplomacy, without preconditions. We will pursue this strengthened diplomacy alongside our European allies, and with no illusions about the Iranian regime. We will present Iran with a clear choice: if you abandon your nuclear weapons program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, you will receive meaningful incentives; so long as you refuse, the United States and the international community will further ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions inside and outside the U.N. Security Council, and sustained action to isolate the Iranian regime. The Iranian people and the international community must know that it is Iran, not the United States, choosing isolation over cooperation. By going the extra diplomatic mile, while keeping all options on the table, we make it more likely the rest of the world will stand with us to increase pressure on Iran, if diplomacy is failing.

Note also that the Democrats are going to be “keeping all options on the table.” I’ve always wondered whether this phrase includes the possibility of America and Israel giving up all their nuclear weapons. I mean, that’s an option—surely if all options on the table, that means our complete nuclear disarmament is there on the table with all the rest of them.

YUP: According to Steve Clemons, the Democratic platform was mostly written by Obama’s Senate office policy director Karen Kornbluh.

(Thanks to Don Bacon for pointing this out. Also, this would be a good time for you to check out Dennis Perrin’s Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War.)