US politics – Page 20

Some good environmental news

Published on November 16, 2008

The EPA’s Appeal Board has ruled that no new coal-fired powerplants can be built without CO2 limiting technology, or at least, that’s the message implied in the Sierra Club press release on the matter:

In a move that signals the start of the our clean energy future, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) ruled today EPA had no valid reason for refusing to limit from new coal-fired power plants the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. The decision means that all new and proposed coal plants nationwide must go back and address their carbon dioxide emissions.

“Today’s decision opens the way for meaningful action to fight global warming and is a major step in bringing about a clean energy economy,” said Joanne Spalding, Sierra Club Senior Attorney who argued the case. “This is one more sign that we must begin repowering, refueling and rebuilding America.”

“The EAB rejected every Bush Administration excuse for failing to regulate the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. This decision gives the Obama Administration a clean slate to begin building our clean energy economy for the 21st century,” continued Spalding

The decision follows a 2007 Supreme Court ruling recognizing carbon dioxide, the principle source of global warming, is a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act.

Looking at the ruling itself (PDF), it seems the truth is sligthly more complicated. The Sierra Club brought this appeal as part of its ogoing battle against a specific new coal-fired power plant in Utah. What the appeals board has decided is not that this plant cannot be built without the “best available control technology” for minimising CO2 output, but instead that the EPA Region responsible for giving a building permit for this plant was wrong not to consider whether or not to require the plant to have this “best available control technology”.

It’s not so much then that every coal-fired powerplant now must have this technology, but rather that, like with various other pollutants, every permit for such a plant needs to consider whether or not this technology must be fitted, depending on circumstances. Additionally, if such technology is to be fitted, it still needs to be determined what this “best available control technology” actually is.

Because of this ruling the permit for this particular project is no longer valid and needs to be reconsidered, which can take one to two years. Even better, every other permit for such a project is back to square one as well, unless they’ve already considered this question. It doesn’t mean the end of coal power in the US, but at the very least it buys time for Obama to get its environmental legislation in order. With pressure from the Sierra Club and other enviromental organisations, the hope is for the new administration to require all coal-fired powerplants to be fitted with CO2 limiting technology.

Way to ruin our fun, Alex

Published on November 12, 20081 Comment

Alex is a big partypooper and interrupts our previously scheduled gloating with a serious post about poverty and why feeling schadenfreude at the misery of even such an obvious dickhead as Du Toit is wrong:

The whole point of everything from some way to the right of centre – Bismarck or thereabouts – leftwards is that IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good christian, a loyal subject, a committed rebel, if you work harder, if you’re especially competent. Even if you’re rich; European history is littered with the monuments of elites who thought they could buy their way out at the last. We survive if everyone else does.

Poverty and misfortune are not, generally, held up by individuals’ decisions; they roll over the landscape, driven by shifts in huge statistical aggregates and channeled by tiny ripples of random chance, just as a flood begins with a rise in average rainfall and ruins one street that’s six inches closer to the water. When you think that so-and-so went bust because of their own immorality, and therefore they join the undeserving poor, you’re signing on with the other side. They will tell you that the system is entirely OK; it’s the ones who failed it who are the problem. They didn’t believe in it enough.

As per usual, Alex’s got a point. In our defense I would like to argue though that we’re not laughing at Du Toit’s misery so much as at the large disconnect between his actions and his beliefs. An internet hard man who ranted about “the pussification of the American male” but who confused talking the talk with walking the walk. Being kind to him won’t change his philosophy or make him understand what Alex is saying here. In his head he will always believe that because he has the right kind of politics the world owes him a living, that while he is struggling heroically to feed his family everybody else in the same situation as him is just lazy and deserves to be poor.

In this he apes his own leaders, the people who’ve been using him and millions more like him, but less high profile. Every wannabe Mad Max sitting in the Monday morning traffic jam listening to Limbaugh, every twentyseven percenter still believing in Bush, every third rate wingnut calling for a leper list of Republicans who were mean to Sarah Palin, all of them had been willing tools of a small elite of cynical manipulators who used them to plunder the country. All of them believed that they themselves were part of that elite, were equal to the Roves and Bushes and Limbaughs and all of them got a rude awakening this past month. First the credit crunch metastatised, then their next big hero, Palin, failed to win the elections for McCain and suddenly the real powerbrokers abandonded them.

What happened to Du Toit and his family is what’s been happening to faithful Republicans and wingnuts all over America. Only a few years ago he was a hero of the blogosphere, riding high while Bush stole another election, part of a seemingly unstoppable coservative movement that would rule America for ever. Now? Just another smalltime loser thrown to the wolves.

Which, as we have seen before, is a dangerous development. One of the biggest challenges the American left, from the centrist part of the Democratic power taking power next january all to the tiny “lunatic fringe” of real socialists that still exists faces in the next four to eight years is how to face the anger and hurt of these millions of “useful idiots” now abandonded by the movement that created them. We desperately need a new, broad leftwing movement that takes the anger and hatred of these people and channels it towards targets deserving of this anger, rather than let if fall into the familiar ruts of xenophobia and resentment of blue America.

Post-election gloat: the betrayal of the wingnuts

Published on November 11, 2008

It’s good to gloat, isn’t it? Not only did America vote for socialism, according to the wingnuts, but even their leaders have betrayed them. Mark Ames has the story:

Like the much more numerous Freepers, the mob at Pajamas Media is outraged because they have been betrayed. It’s not just that the liberals betrayed them, but that the leaders they’d followed — Fox News, right-wing bloggers, and the Republican elite who have been mobilizing their pitchfork fury — now find their savagery a liability, and they’re abandoning them. It’s the fury of having been played for a sucker — and the “real American” mob has been played for the biggest sucker in American history, as is clear from their sense of abandonment.

It is an incredible spectacle to behold: the Republican elite abandoning a 20-year narrative at the snap of a finger just to make sure that it is positioned well in the new Obama dynamic. The Republican elite has clearly decided that the “Real America” mob it had exploited had become a liability, but still it’s amazing how seamlessly and quickly it can throw its own audience overboard. Witness the smear campaign against the right-wing mob’s heroine, Sarah Palin, who is now being taken down by none other than Bill O’Reilly.

Fun as it is to see all those rageoids, queen bees and internet hard men waking up to discover they had just been thrown away like a day old condom, it’s also a bit worrying. These are the people who at every turn in their life have made the wrong choice; they’re not going to have any road to Damascus style conversion, see the light and become good Democrats. No, as documented by our good friends at Alicublog or Sadly, No, tif anything this experience is only going to harden their views, and having a legion of bitter, resentful, angry people around blaming Obama and the Democrats, as well as their erstwhile leaders for their own failures is not a recipe for happiness. We don’t need to look at the example of Weimar Germany to see how dangerous this situation could be, American history has a fair few examples of its own as well.

The Truth Is Out There

Published on October 20, 2008

While the big clunking bat of the Justice department and FBI are being aimed by a Republican administration at a legitimate voter-ed NGO that registers poor, minority (and consequently more likely Democrat) voters – 2 weeks before an election, in breach of political bias rules – it took Canada to actually arrest a Republican for vote fraud:

Ontario police arrest man in voter fraud case
By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 20, 2008

SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

Jacoby’s arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP

Law enforcement and the media are all over ACORN like a rash, with little or no reason other than having been told to do so, yet actual fraud by the party now in power is taking place in clear daylight all over the nation and it’s barely even reported; the news of this arrest was, hidden away in the LA Times Local section.

But hearteningly it’s spreading like wildfire across the interwebs and is top of the paper’s own ‘most viewed’ story list and if you google for YPM you’ll find a host of stories from all over the place about their voterigging activities.

YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.

Even in McCain’s home state? Fancy that. YPM’s voter suprresion efforts are widespread:

It all sounds familiar to Beverly Hill, a Democrat and the former election supervisor in Florida’s Alachua County. About 200 voters — mostly college students — were unwittingly registered as Republicans there in 2004 by YPM staffers using the same tactic, Hill said.

“It is just incredible that this can keep happening election after election,” she said.

Isn’t it just. Why, you’d almost think it was planned, wouldn’t you? Typically, even while wriggling on the hook the Republicans try and smear their accusers with the very crime they themselves are accused of:

In a written statement Sunday, the state Republican Party called the charges against Jacoby “politically motivated.” The party said the charges do not support accusations from voters and Democratic officials that YPM has been duping voters into joining the GOP.

The statement accused Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who announced the arrest, of “using her office to play politics.”

Bowen is a Democrat.

Sunday Morning Breakfast Read

Published on October 12, 2008

The New York Times’ Sunday magazine big feature today is indeed a big read – it’s a 9-page letter on food and agricultural policy by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, addressed to the incoming US President

It’s a lot of blocktext for sleepy eyes to wake up to but stick with it: this big epistle makes absorbing if frightening reading:

…with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet.

Read whole thing

And what are Zimbabweans eating right now? Nothing, it seems. But the starving in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia and the Sudan are easy to ignore, as are food riots in the Phillipines and India; out of sight etc.

But food insecurity is getting closer to home all the time. I’ve been wondering what the hell the Icelanders are going to eat next year when much of their food is imported and they have no money to pay for it…

Who me, say ‘I told you so’? For the past few years I’ve been banging on about how horribly unprepared people are for the inevitable food shortages and poverty that will follow the world’s bigger nations’ disastrous policies.

I will be enjoying my coffee and bacon while I still can, but in the meantime I’m stockpiling oatmeal and potatoes and re-reading all my Marguerite Patten WWII cookbooks. Just in case.