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Sacrifice theme returns to US politics
Alexandra Marks, Christian Science Monitor
The notion of sacrifice – asking Americans to give something up for a greater good – appears to be coming back into political vogue after decades of being seen as a poison pill.
Both major-party presidential candidates are emphasizing the need for individuals to shoulder responsibility for changing the direction of the United States, though they do so in different ways.
Personal sacrifice and service to the nation are central themes of John McCain’s candidacy. His campaign motto sums it up: “Country First.”
On the stump, Barack Obama cites the merits of sacrifice, calling it central to patriotism and urging Americans to help change the country’s direction – whether by turning off the television so children can study or by supporting higher taxes for wealthy corporations and individuals.
Both candidates have also called for expanded national service programs and lamented the Bush administration’s failure to tap the outpouring of civic and patriotic sentiment after the 9/11 attacks.
Not since President John Kennedy urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” has the rhetoric of sacrifice sat this well with the public. Concern that the US confronts a huge crisis in the form of a global financial meltdown, plus an untapped desire since 9/11 to help the nation more, makes the public more receptive to the idea that sacrifice can be noble instead of just inconvenient.
(2 November 2008)
A Nervous Nation
James Howard Kunstler, Blog
… Other people are afraid that Mr. Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans — such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don’t have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs.
He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.
Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become “energy independent” is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we’re going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed. We’ll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently — in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals).
Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia — our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future — will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.
I reject the label “gloom-and-doomer” where these difficult transitions are concerned. There’s a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic — from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don’t know it yet. Mr. Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.
(3 November 2008)
Perpetrator of B.C. blast likely from area, police say
Canadian Press via Globe and Mail
Investigators from the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team renewed their call for the public’s help Saturday as they continued to probe a third deliberate explosion targeting natural gas pipelines in northeastern B.C.
Crews from oil and gas giant EnCana, whose pipelines have been the target of all three blasts, were still at the scene near Dawson Creek at midday, trying to stop the flow of gas.
Police investigators have numerous leads but continue to believe whoever was responsible for the explosion has extensive local knowledge and may be from the area, RCMP spokesman Sergeant Tim Shields told a news conference.
…Sgt. Shields said police were concerned that a number of people heard the latest blast but none reported it.
…Many critics of sour gas development fear the gas, which can be fatal if enough of it is inhaled, poses a danger to people nearby.
The case has kindled memories of the vandalism that plagued Alberta’s oilpatch in the 1990s.
(1 November 2008)
Obama might ‘bankrupt’ coal, but so would McCain
Dan Turner, Los Angeles Times
We get a lot of press releases here at the Opinion Manufacturing Division that pass without comment, but today’s missive from the Western Business Roundtable is such a masterpiece of obfuscation that it cries out to be posted here, especially because it repeats similar baseless accusations against Barack Obama that were raised today by vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Here are the first two paragraphs of the release:
…. Note carefully what Obama is saying here: He wants a cap-and-trade program that would set a price for greenhouse-gas emissions. That would make it prohibitively expensive to build new conventional coal plants, because they emit vast amounts of carbon. Yet that’s not the way the Business Roundtable, a marketing organization for a coalition of Western CEOs, puts it. Its release says Obama’s proposal would make it impossible to build “advanced clean coal power plants with carbon capture and sequestration.” Actually, if the technology to capture and bury carbon emissions from coal plants existed (it’s still under study, and may never be commercially viable), such a plant would emit only trace amounts of carbon, and thus be perfectly viable under Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme.
This is why business groups get a bad name for trying to “greenwash” environmentally destructive projects: The roundtable clearly objects to Obama’s stance on dirty, conventional coal, but in order to look as if it cares about the environment, it’s pretending that Obama actually opposes carbon-capture technology, which he has repeatedly backed (that’s what Obama meant when he said “if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it”).
(3 November 2008)
Postcard to the New U.S. Prez
Rochelle Riling, Energy Bulletin
Congratulations on your new job. We, the people who you are supposed to represent, have a few simple requests now, listed below in order of priority.
(1) A World-wide Cease Fire. Just give it a shot. At least ask for it. I mean, no one has even laid it on the table. It is as if such a possibility is unthinkable. You need to make it thinkable.
(2) A World-wide Celebration of all that is worth cherishing in the world: the human, the four-legged, two-legged and no-legged; the land, the waters, the air, the stars; the past, the future, the now; those who are gone, those yet to come; love, creativity, ingenuity, compassion, courage, perseverance, and forgiveness. And vegetables. Vegetables should probably be included.
(3) An genuine apology for the manner in which your country, in attempting to provide for its own people, has taken so much from the others in the world. (See #2 above for details.) And remember “sorry” means making changes.
(4) The initiation of a sustained, truthful dialog about the myriad challenges faced together by all of humanity, each of which hinges on twin pillars poised to go down just like those towers went down not so long ago: energy and population.
(5) The safeguarding and rightful action necessary to maintain or bring to fruition the requests (and any subsequent life-sustaining results) noted in items 1 – 4 above.
After that, you can do as you please. Thanks in advance for your swift attention to these matters.
(3 November 2008)
Sent in by a reader. The Toronto Star has more advice: What world needs from U.S..
A Darker Future For Us
Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek
It’s not just the financial crisis: higher taxes, energy costs and health spending also threaten growth.
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We Americans are progress junkies. We think that today should be better than yesterday and that tomorrow should be better than today. Compared with most other peoples, we place more faith in “opportunity” and “getting ahead.” We may now be on the cusp of a new era that frustrates these widespread expectations. It is not just the present financial crisis and its astonishing side effects, from bank rescues to frenzied stock-market swings. The crisis coincides with a series of other challenges—an aging society, runaway health spending, global warming—that imperil economic growth. America’s next president takes office facing the most daunting economic conditions in decades: certainly since Ronald Reagan and double-digit inflation, and perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt and 25 percent unemployment.
It’s fair to note that the U.S. economy has a long record of defying pessimistic predictions. Our national culture, with its pervasive ambition and its proven capacity for innovation, favors expansion. These are powerful forces. But it’s equally true that economic progress has periodically stalled.
… Could the economy now be at one of these historic inflection points, when its past behavior is no longer a reliable guide to its future? That is the central question confronting the next president. Only the most hardened among us cannot have been rattled by recent events that were scarcely conceivable two years ago.
… The closer the economy comes to stagnation, the more Americans will succumb to distributional struggles—not just between the rich and the poor, but also between the young and the old and between immigrants and natives.
Down that path lies “affluent deprivation.” To use an old but apt cliché: people will fight over pieces of a fairly fixed economic pie rather than sharing ever-larger pieces of an expanding pie. The winners may be pleased, but the losers will feel short-changed—and so the conflicts may intensify, with yesterday’s winners possibly becoming tomorrow’s losers. Politics, which is often about rewarding some and punishing others, may become more so.
… Finally, there’s energy. Despite their recent drop, oil prices at about $65 a barrel remain well above the $29 average of 2003. Combating global warming would also raise prices. Many Americans imagine that greenhouse gases can be cut painlessly—just order companies to do it. This is a fantasy.
… Just producing cleaner, high-cost energy for its own sake makes no sense. Our main emphasis should be on research and development. The greatest hope of combating global warming lies in new technologies that would eliminate greenhouse emissions and produce, at acceptable costs, the energy that rich and poor countries need for economic growth. Carbon “capture and storage” would be one; battery-powered autos would be another. We could also adopt policies desirable on other grounds—such as reducing oil imports—that might slightly cut greenhouse gases.
… Whatever happens, the future of American affluence will be a state of mind as much as a state of production. So much of our national identity is wrapped up in economic progress that the failure to achieve it in palpable quantities would sap Americans’ self-confidence. There have been other moments when the outlook seemed grim, but enduring American strengths—a widespread work ethic and strong entrepreneurial spirit—asserted themselves and disproved the conventional wisdom.
Adapted from “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence” by Robert J. Samuelson. © 2008 by Robert J. Samuelson. To be published by Random House, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group.
(1 November 2008)
I think Samuelson captures the mainstream view which has shifted dramatically over the past year. -BA
