Depressing August

Dear Friends,

August has been a very depressing month.  The politicians, the pundits, the people have all been distracted by the community center near ground zero, Glen Beck's rally, meaningless primaries, the most recent goings on with the Hollywood stars, etc.  Right now there are two things that are critical to our country's long term future - jobs and wars.

The "combat mission" part of the Iraq war has come to a close because we agreed with the Iraqi government that it would by September 1st.  So now we have less than 50,000 troops in Iraq.  We should not have any.  The Iraqi politicians have not been able to form a government in over 6 months.  The Iraq war will end up with us leaving and hoping that something good will happen.  It is possible something good will happen, because the Iraqis have had a civil war and are now tired of that but they do not seem inclined to try to unify their country.  But we are not ones to talk, the political climate in this country is completely divisive.

Unfortunately, my guess is that in a few years after many more lives have been lost and ruined, we will leave Afghanistan in much the same way.  Nobody has said clearly what victory is because there can be no victory.  We can kill enough people to provide some calm on the surface so that the politicians could do something but all they do is continue to line their pockets with graft money and fight to maintain their power.  In this country we have more genteel words for it but many of our politicians are doing the same thing - raising obscene amounts of money from corporate interests and working to maintain their power, rather than focusing on what is good for the country.

So the wars go on and the military industrial complex continues to control what we do in the world.  Apart from an occasional voice of reason in Congress, our politicians continue to act at the beck and call of the huge corporations that fund their profits and their political contributions through military contracts.

At the same time, our politicians are not willing to even discuss what we need to do to create the jobs needed to put Americans back to work so that our economy can recover and vice versa.  The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Laura Tyson today entitled "Why We Need a Second Stimulus" (here).  She explains exactly why we need a second stimulus in clear logical terms.  Why can't our President and the members of Congress that call themselves Democrats make such an argument?  Her position is sound economics, it is sound policy, and it is great politics.  It does require a leader with an a ability to communicate and energize people, a leader that is bold and inspiring, a leader that is willing to take risks, a leader who will challenge the naysayers, a leader who respects the electorate, and a leader who will fight for what she/he believes unwaveringly.  Apparently, there aren't any of that type of leader around.

Bloomberg Business Week reported (here) that

China, the world’s biggest polluter, may spend about 5 trillion yuan ($738 billion) in the next decade developing cleaner sources of energy to reduce emissions from burning oil and coal.
China erected more wind turbines in 2009 than any other country and may install a record 18 gigawatts of wind-power capacity in 2010, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates show.

On August 13, 2010, Fortune published an article entitled "Renewable Energy:  The Government Piggybank" (here).  The first paragraph reads:

If the government truly wants America to go green, it's going to have to shell out to support the nascent but important sector of our economy. Green jobs and renewable energy were boldly funded in the stimulus bill, yet whenever Congress and the Obama administration need to scare up capital to fund some other program, they chip away at the initial $37 billion allocated for climate and energy-related efforts.

The article goes on to say that in order to find the $26 billion for the recently passed bill to help the states that $1.5 billion of that came by reducing the green energy allocation of $37 billion.  I think that the help to the states was really important but why would we reduce the already paltry amount that we are providing to encourage green technology and jobs?  But if the Chinese are spending $74 billion a year and we are spending less than half that with no long term plan, what difference does $1.5 billion make?

If the Chinese beat us at developing green technology which they are well on their way to doing, we will never recover the jobs that we have lost in this country.  The United States has always been a technology leader, but we are falling behind while our politicians find ways to distract us rather than facing the realities of a world in which we are losing our role.  If we are to regain the jobs that have been lost and provide long-term economic growth and job security, we must be willing to stimulate the economy.  There are two great ways to do that.  One is to improve our infrastructure and the other is to invest in green technology that will produce jobs both now and well into the future.

The President of the United States is the only person who can provide the leadership that we need to provide a second stimulus, to invest in green technology and get out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Unfortunately, the current President seems unwilling to provide the leadership we need.  Frank Rich wrote a great op-ed piece in The New York Times today (here) in which he pointed out that President Franklin Roosevelt and President John Kennedy both faced well financed right wing fringe challenges and that both of them prevailed by being leaders.  He concludes that President Obama while facing the same challenges so far has failed to lead.  Here are the ending of the piece:

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal