May 11, 2006
The question is simple and plain as day, and personally I would love to put it to the republican leadership in Congress. (In reality, they’d probably come back with “well, it would cost jobs too,” which is perhaps the most often used cop-out when it comes to environmental change or reform-and also the one that it most likely to scare off dissent and wave off the analysis required to prove it wrong in almost all cases) It goes like this:
If We Can Fund the War in Iraq, Why Can’t We Fund the Kyoto Protocol?
In a few short years, we’ve spent over $300 Billion USD on the war in Iraq, which is admittedly and obviously a significant problem, if not in many regards and absolute failure, and is costing the people of the United States the lives of our children and countrymen every day, costing us credibility elsewhere in the world and bargaining power in diplomatic and trade negotiations, and costing us dearly in terms of national security, and costing the Iraqi people their sons and daughters and their very lives on an extreme scale on a daily basis. But the tie-in here isn’t about the Iraq War and the problems with it-the tie in is that considering America has spent $300 Billion dollars since the war began and not suffered some massive and extreme collapse since then, why couldn’t we have spent the $325 Billion that analysts estimated compliance with the Kyoto Protocol would have cost us, over several decades?
Many people mention frequently the significant turbulence that the American economy is going through because of this massive defecit spending, raising of the federal debt cieling, and frequent calls for Congress to allocate additional funding to the war, but no one doubts that the American economy will be able to withstand it, especially if the rampant spending stops sometime in the near future. (and even in some cases, it does not, as the war doesn’t seem to be concluding anytime soon) But, for a moment, imagine if we could have spent that same money on something with tangible positive results, a global benefit to the health of not just all Americans but all people on the planet, and to set an example to countries like China, Russia, and India that would give us the bargaining position to press them into positive environmental reform as well as in trade and political negotiations. The same money, over a longer period, with real benefits and fewer drawbacks, without the economic fallout.
Not such a horrible idea, in my opinion, and apparently Cass Sunstein understands this as well; as his analysis of the two costs in the Washington Post is startling and on point.
[ It's Only $300 Billion ]
Source: The Washington Post
The republicans have a valid argument by claiming that you can’t pull up the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer; and indeed no one is claiming that the rich and wealthy are demons to be robbed of their worth and to have it delivered in gilded bankrolls to the poor, but the problem is that every time anyone brings up the possibility of the wealthiest Americans paying their fair share of their massive earnings (as opposed to the current tax structure, which only requires them to pay a pittance on their investments, capital gains, and dividends, and only income tax up to the first $300,000 they earn per year-with millionaires essentially not paying a dime on the rest of their massive salaries) these arguments dredge up. The republicans would love to have you and I believe that there is no such thing as a class divide; but those of us connected with the real world have only to walk outside on a city street to see the very real effects of poverty that haven’t changed at all, even though we’re consistently being fed the conservative line that the “economy is growing,” and things are “getting better.”
Meanwhile, the middle and lower classes spin into poverty, social safety nets like social security and medicare are being shredded beneath them, and while the labor department reports drops in unemployment, the translation of those figures is that there are more low and minimum wage jobs now than before, and many Americans who are jobless have simply given up looking for work. Even those of us lucky enough to be employed aren’t seeing wage increases that keep up with inflation or the cost of living, while our CEOs and superiors rake in salaries that are several hundred times that of our own, and are steadily increasing.
So what’s the problem here? The so-called “welfare state” that the conservatives are claiming we desperately must avoid becoming, is exactly what they envisioned, except on its head. The poor subsidize the rich, with aggressive taxation and having to bear the burden of social programs that at first glance would be in turn used by the poor, but in reality are simply designed to benefit the industries that the wealthier among us manage, run, contract with, and make their living off of. Those taxes go to projects that congress and the conservative leaders in government spend freely for causes that benefit either no one (like the war in Iraq, and the failed reconstruction efforts there) or benefit themselves. (tax breaks for the oil industry, lax regulation on the auto industry, the persistent and untrue notion that HMOs and Managed Care companies have the public interest at heart, etc)
In an excellent analysis of this new America, where the blood, sweat, and tears of the masses subsidize the wine and caviar of the extremely wealthy, Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, puts the truth out there as plain as anyone can say it.
[ The Welfare Kings ]
Source: TomPaine.com
May 9, 2006
We’ve known all along that the anti-choicers have no desire to stop with abortion if their socially backwards agenda were to succeed; their ultimate goal is an anti-sex society, where sexual opinions are conservative, mired in religious doctrine that only they are allowed to deem suitable, absolutely repressive of women, repressive (or even discriminatory against) homosexuals, and essentially abolishes not only abortion, but contraception, women’s rights, discmisses victims rights in cases of rape and sexual assault, and forces child sexual abuse victims back into the shame closet. This is the potential future when those who would write into law what can and cannot go on between an individual and their doctor, or a husband and his wife, or a lover and his or her partner. ]
Russell Shorto brings another long but incredibly important to read piece to us about the modern campaign to turn back the clock on reproductive rights, potentially with the goal of eliminating such rights altogether, stripping Americans of the freedom to decide when and how to have children, raise their own families, and potentially balooning teenage pregnancy rates, STD infections, unwanted pregnancies, and filling orphanages with children being cared for by the money that will subsequently be drained from federal and state public health and human services coffers.
The article points out that in Europe, which has a far more liberal attitude towards reproductive rights than the United States, worked a long time to get to where it is now, and its rates of STD infections, child mortality, abortions and unwanted pregnancies, and orphaned children are significantly lower than in the United States. So why are we going the other direction when there’s empirical evidence to support turning around and heading in a more progressive direction?
Shorto follows the follies in recent memory by the FDA involving Plan B, the so called “morning after” pill, the changing medical debate over varying methods of contraception and whether they amount to being abortants, and where this sudden drive from Christian fundamentalists and social conservatives is coming from.
[ Contra-Contraception ]
Source: The New York Times Magazine
More effective than drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, more effective than building partnerships with foriegn governments, would be increasing the gas milage of the cars and trucks on Americas roads. Already we have hybrid vehicles that can see upwards of 50 miles to the gallon in real-world driving, but at the same time we still see pitiful SUVs that get 15 city/18 highway, and that’s just sad. Many environmentalists, state governments, and scientists are pressing the government to push the auto industry to adopt more fuel efficient standards and higher milage targets for new vehicles, pointing at both customer demand, environmental need, and the rising price of gasoline all as valid reasoning. Unfortunately, because of the immense weight that the auto and oil industries hold in Washington little change has come from the EPA to date, and even pressure from state governments, 10 of which recently sued the EPA over such lax policies towards the auto industry and pollution but aggressively stopping state governments from regulating pollution on its own, hasn’t swayed the position of the Administration on the environment.
As I’m proudly a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, I can completely support and agree with this statement:
Like the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental group of scientists and citizens, as well as other supporters of more rigorous CAFE standards, Mr. Becker asserts that the technology already exists to make all new vehicles average 40 miles per gallon within 10 years.
“Taking this step would save the average driver over $5,000 over the lifetime of their vehicle, even after accounting for the added cost of the fuel-saving technology,” he says. “At the same time, raising fuel economy standards would save 4 million barrels of oil per day – an amount equal to what America currently imports from the entire Persian Gulf and could ever get out of the Arctic Refuge, combined.”
Union of Concerned Scientists researcher David Friedman projects that driving a 40 m.p.g. car “would be the equivalent of offering a $600 annual tax break from reduced fuel costs.”
…but for some reason, auto manufcaturers claim that doing this would be “prohibitively expensive,” and that if they were forced to, they again threaten to push the “cost” to the consumers, meaning higher prices for cars, even though decreased demand would in turn mean lower prices for oil. It would work, and we know this, but what does the Administration have to say? In a typical nonsensical, smoke-and-mirrors (more like sand in our faces) response, here’s what Transportation Secreatary Norman Mineta had to say:
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta warned about a universal increase in fuel efficiency for all new cars. “Substantial increases in CAFE standards under the current single standard approach would increase fatalities on America’s highways, raise healthcare costs, and reduce employment,” he said in a recent letter to congressional leaders.
How it would do any of those things is completely unclear and left up to the imagination. My guess is that Mineta chose instead to toss in some hyperbole that he knew would make the congresspeople who read it afraid enough to drop the issue, even if there was no information or evidence to back up the statement, which of course, there isn’t. Seriously, someone please show me an even possible relationship between higher gas milage and highway fatalities. Or healthcare costs (except perhaps a drop in healthcare costs due to the decrease of pollution and dirty air in our lungs), or even job loss. (to the contrary, the investment in new, more fuel efficient technologies could lead to a manufacturing and technological boon, but the auto industry would never say that aloud)
The full article, maddening and depressing as it might be to read where the Administration stands on the issue, is over at the Christian Science Monitor; read it and weep, and if you’re concerned about America’s energy crisis, make sure to get to the polls in the fall.
[ A Push for Cars to Get Better Gas Mileage ]
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
Net Neutrality, for the uninitiated to the topic, is essentially the campaign to push back on large telecommunications companies that want to charge companies and organizations that use more bandwidth a different price (and a higher one) for using more bandwidth than smaller organizations or companies that don’t use so much. The topic started a while ago when companies like AT&T and Verizon demanded that companies that are dependant on bandwidth and rapid delivery of their content like Google and Microsoft pay them more for being high bandwidth consumers. They claimed that their existing hosting and bandwidth plans don’t take into account the bandwidth that they use, and argued that since it costs them more to give those companies the bandwidth they need, they should pay more.
The problem with this argument is not only that it doesn’t cost appreciably more for Google to be serviced by AT&T than it does for Ask.com to be services by AT&T, but Telecomms already charge people on both ends of the wire for data delivery services; meaning they charge the company that needs the content delivered, and they charge you and I for the delivery and our subcription to a service plan. So what’s the problem here? Well, a system that’s leveraged by who’s popular and who’s not, who has more money to spend on bandwidth and who doesn’t, leads to a serious problem with the architecture of the Internet. Many of us who have hosting plans know what it’s like to pay for bandwidth, and dread the day we might get popular and our bandwidth costs shoot through the roof, but imagine an Internet where the Fox News website is always fast, but your local NPR affiliate has to bring their site down from time to time to conserve bandwidth.
Annalee Newitz says it better than I could:
The problem with this moneymaking idea is that the architects of the Internet and industry regulators at the FCC are enamored of something they call the network neutrality principle. Although never written into US law, this principle holds that nobody’s Internet traffic should be privileged over anybody else’s — to do so would be like letting an electricity company cut a deal with GE so that only GE appliances got good current. As it turns out, the neutral network provides an excellent platform for business models that cluster at the ends of the wires: Everything from Google and eBay to ISPs and music-downloading companies are based on the idea that money is made by shooting good stuff over the wires, not by making some wires better at getting good stuff.
Underlying network neutrality is the idea that people should be allowed to attach whatever they like to the ends of the Internet’s wires — and they should be able to do it without significant hindrances, like paying steep access fees to AT&T to get their businesses online. Neutrality is why we routinely get cool new “end” innovations like virtual reality world Second Life or smart phones that connect to the Internet. As both Internet protocol inventor Vint Cerf and former FCC chair Michael Powell have argued, these kinds of new worlds and widgets are only possible because the wires are neutral and their ends are open.
What would a world without network neutrality be like? The worst possibility is that companies like AT&T would create “prejudiced pipes” that push paying customers’ traffic along more quickly than nonpaying customers’. If indie bookstore Powell’s wasn’t able to pay AT&T’s fees, its online store might load far more slowly than Amazon’s — if it even loaded at all. Some companies might force music and movie companies to pay extra to make their downloads work, thus preventing anyone but the major labels and studios from making their wares available online. Ultimately, consumers would have less choice online, and small “end” start-ups would be at a great disadvantage when they put their stuff online. If established players like the New York Times can pay the prejudiced-pipe owners for quicker load times, who will bother to read slow-moving blogs?
Net Neutrality is coming up in the Senate soon, where it has more bipartisan support than it did in the deeply Republican house. The Telecomms exerted their influence on the House, but here’s to hoping the Senate will be more inclined to listen to reason. Check out Newitz’s article for an excellent primer on why this is an important issue, and check out MoveOn.org’s campaign to save the Internet to get in touch with your representatives in Congress to let them know how you feel.
[ The Web We Love is Endangered ]
Source: AlterNet
[ Save The Internet ]
May 4, 2006
Media Matters for America, [ http://mediamatters.org/ ] who is always on guard and on the ball against conservative disinformation in the mass media, and the ones who broke the study that the so-called “liberal bias” in media is a provable myth: [ See: So Much for the Liberal Media… Highlighting “If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative…” ] have come to the fore again highlighting the actions of CNN, who has recently hired Glenn Beck, far-right conservative hatemonger, to host a show on CNN Headline News.
CNN has one of the most lucrative and accessable news networks in the world, and one would have thought that they would have more journalistic integrity and forethought than to allow a man on the air who has called illegal immigrants “terrorists,” or “people who can’t make a living in their own dirtbag country,” carte blanche to bring his not-at-all unique brand of hatred and ignorance to the airwaves and into millions of homes. I’m sure he’s dancing a jig to have the opportunity to make his horrible beliefs mainstream, but Media Matters (and I) won’t let him if we have anything to say about it.
Just in case you don’t know the oozing scab on the face of mass media that is Glenn Beck, allow me to give you some of his statements, highlighted thanks to Media Matters, and then we’ll finish up on how to contact CNN and let them know you hate him as much as the rest of America does:
(more…)
From the “thanks for what we all knew, seriously” department, a new federal study finally puts the nail in the coffin of global warming skeptics like the Bush Administration that have been forced to admit that warming is a reality but that there are no significant ties between that warming and human activity, specifically the emission of greenhouse gases into the lower atmosphere. The study has stated that there is “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system,” which eliminates that final sticking point that auto industry lobbyists and press folks as well as Administration press folks have used to decry the problem of climate change as possibly something mythical that’s occuring naturally somehow.
Even so, White House officials tried to pass off the study as being “inconclusive” and only the first in a set of forthcoming studies, even though the scientists involved in this and other studies signed off on it as being essentially conclusive, in line with their expectations, predictions, and computer simulations, and in the end leading to an accord among climatologists that global warming is not only real, but definitely at the very least in part due to human gas emissions, pollution, and real effects on the global ecosystem.
[Federal Study Finds Accord on Warming ]
Source: The New York Times
In probably the most underreported breakthrough story of the day (probably because of the involvement of the Clinton foundation, without a doubt) the Clinton Foundation along with Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes (who combined essentially dominate the softdrink market, and all own the most popular brands of beverage) have come to an agreement to stop selling the kinds of sugary sodas and softdrinks in schools that have been partially credited with increasing rates of childhood malnutrition, diabetes, and obesity among American children. In elementary and middle schools, soda won’t be sold at all, and in high schools the carbonated soft drink (CSD) companies will sell diet options.
Personally, I think this is a significant achievement that’s very obviously a win-win for everyone involved. The social libertarians and the pro-business-at-any-cost folks will cry “personal responsibility” and question “where the parents are,” and whatnot and make the slippery slope argument about “what’s next,” and so on and so forth, but the medical effects of the easy, no-question, no-warning access of soda to children can’t really be debated. But that’s not my point here. For a long time now, the CSD industry companies have known that there’s less and less money overall in softdrinks. The spending has changed directions to bottled water and fashionable hybrid drinks, like vitamin water, flavored waters, and sport drinks. This new agreement, which is additionally remarkable because it requires no government mandate and no governmental regulation or oversight and is completely voluntary on the part of the CSD companies, also allows the CSD industry participants to remove their sugary sweet drinks and replace them with higher margin bottled water, tasty fruit-flavored waters, and other drinks that make the companies more money while simultaneously giving schoolchildren healthier beverage options.
My congratulations go out to the Clinton Foundation for brokering this deal and all of their continuing work, and I give definite praise to Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Cadbury Schweppes for realizing that sometimes corporate social responsibility and sustainability doesn’t have to equate “unprofitable,” to the contrary, there’s much money to be made in helping America along a healthier path, and quite a lot of good publicity to be gained as well.
[ Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Cadbury Schweppes Ban Soda in Schools in Clinton Deal ]
Source: Bloomberg
May 3, 2006
The White House Press Corps Dinner was on April 29th, and I hadn’t said anything yet about Stephen Colbert’s remarkable performance that night, namely because everyone else was already talking about it. But I couldn’t resist with the creation of a site dedicated to thanking Colbert for his fine, choice words for the President, the Administration, and the media on that fine, fine night.
In case you missed the video or missed his comments at the podium, there are links over at the newly created thank you site:
[ http://thankyoustephencolbert.org/ ]
Where you can click to watch the videos, and then add your own thank you to the blog; as of this post, they’re up to 35194 “Thank Yous,” all of which are definitely deserved. So thank you Stephen, for telling it like it is to the face of people who seem to refuse to see it for themselves. Thank you for exposing the entire relationship between the media and the President as a sham, thank you for calling it like you see it, and thank you for having the guys to pull no punches and roast the President in your amazingly entertaining ironic fashion. Thank you so incredibly much-this was a perfect example of one of those times when as the laughter from the administration-friendly audience died away to nervous chuckles the truthiness, as you would say, of your jokes made themselves more than apparent. Excellent work.
