Tag: HuffPo

[If the nation took an extremely vigorous stance on oil exploitation – and relaxed restrictions on the Gulf and drilled in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and off the coast of California, where America’s most easily accessible offshore oil is located – it still would not have much of an impact.] 
With the exception of the deep Gulf, where there are restrictions, people are drilling as fast as they can […] You might, under really optimistic scenarios, over five or six years, add 2 million barrels a day of production. On a global scale, it’s significant. But we would still be big importers – we would still be dependent on foreign oil. [Oil is traded on a world market, and the United States does not have enough petroleum to increase the global supply, which would reduce demand – and thus the price – for fuel.]

Mike Lynch, Strategic Energy and Economic Research, Inc. analyst and a self-proclaimed Republican, speaking to the Huffington Post. This cannot be repeated frequently enough. Something like it should be a regular refrain for Obama and all top Democratic leaders.
“Drill, baby, drill!” simply will not, cannot work to reduce, much less end our dependence on foreign oil. Period. Wishing won’t make it so. Willpower doesn’t enter into it. There isn’t enough oil on the Earth. Full stop.
All talk of carbon and its impacts aside: Find cheap space oil or think of some other way to generate power. Those are your two choices. Drilling won’t fix it. Ever.

Newsflash: Democrats Help Conservatives

George Lakoff represents:

Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks – talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. “Benefits” are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.

Yep. This is the neutron bomb of the pension debate, and The Democrat never, ever deigns to pick it up and use it. There is simply no rational defense within the “true conservative” worldview for the elimination of pensions. And yet we see that trotted forward as a “serious person” position over and over and over again. It is, in fact, the utter failure of the market to regulate itself.
Two parties willingly entered a contract; one party decided not to live up to their end, systematically and with malice aforethought underfunding the pensions to make quarterlies look better or election-year budgets seem sounder than they were; now the other party, the one that did their part and often took cuts in other areas specifically in exchange for better retirement packages, is simply told to suck it while the latter party sops up even more of the money the two had agreed to divide in some way. This is inherently and indisputably a failure of the market principle, enabled by GOP and to the sole benefit of the very same plutocrats who put us in this ditch to begin with. It’s no coincidence that Wall Street is earning a ridiculously high 15% vig on the management of the very pension fund that’s in trouble in WI. What a surprise. By making these tough cuts, I’m sure we can get that right up to 20%, though…here boys, take some tax credits and corporate welfare handouts.

And what’s most disturbing of all: this is emerging as the fundamental shape of the Social Security debate.

Newsflash: Democrats Help Conservatives

Center-right radical socialism

“ My fellow Americans, in the past weeks we have witnessed a string of avoidable tragedies caused by the excesses of corporations and their executives. Millions of innocent people have suffered economic losses and dozens have lost their lives. The heedless rapacity of BP will cause suffering to the fishing industry, damage to the Gulf’s fragile ecology and new economic losses to a region that is only beginning to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“The mining disaster is another reason why we cannot rely on corporations to act in the public interest. Unless government vigorously policies mine safety, more miners will lose their lives, more wives will lose husbands and more children will lose fathers. But better enforcement of oil and coal safety will never solve the entire problem. We as a nation must do what BP cynically professed it was doing. We must move beyond petroleum and beyond carbon.

"And the mother of all economic catastrophes, the financial collapse, is further proof that markets must not be left to their own devices. We need the toughest possible regulation of Wall Street so that the rest of the economy can recover.

—Robert Kuttner, saying what Obama won’t.
Kuttner goes on:

Gentle reader, presidents on occasion have actually made speeches like this. Roosevelt did. Lyndon Johnson did during the civil rights era. You could look it up. They used events to move public opinion. They built popular support for progressive interventions.

To which I add: yep.