Liberal Voices

A sane energy policy

We are heading toward 7 billion people on our blue planet. Food is becoming more scarce in third-world countries while grain is doubling and tripling in price over the last few years.

Before George Bush became president, oil was $10 a barrel; a few days ago it hit $117 a barrel. Gas prices are approaching $4 a gallon in the U.S. while symptoms of economic travail become more evident.

Many say we are running out of planet to exploit for sustaining a burgeoning world population. And others predict that countries rich in that liquid gold (oil) will, failing discovery of alternative fuels, become the dominant world economic powers in only a few decades to come.

Before American fundamentalists attribute these words to doomsayers and envious critics of a superior way of life, we might want to look further at the evidence.

Is it pure speculation – investors looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates – that is driving up prices – another bubble to burst someday? People like American businessman, Warren Buffett, think so.

Is it rapidly growing demand from those emulating America’s profligate ways – countries like China and India clamoring for oil and raw materials? Or are we running out of oil to feed the growth frenzy, out of land to expand food production – generally cheap resources to exploit?

The first explanation would indicate withholding commodities from the market while we watch prices go through the ceiling. Then sell them at much higher prices. There doesn’t seem to be an inventory glut of food or oil, in spite of the downturn that seems to be underway.

Growing demand and depletion of resources seem to be a more evident phenomenon. Scientists for decades say that we have reached or are reaching peak oil production. Certainly for centuries (Eighteenth Century political economist, Thomas Malthus, for one) we have been told that much less than six billion people can be sustained on our planet.

Of course, there have always been innovations, new developments that have come along, and that is what a lot of people believe will happen again. It was oil discoveries, modern farming, growth industries, and so on.

But now we have huge demands for resources from the developing countries and a much larger population to sustain than there was in the 1970s era of long lines at the gas pumps and inflation. Now we have global warming that has caused years of drought in grain-producing countries.

And for almost a decade, the world has suffered chaos and environmental indecision due to pillaging, imperialistic American leadership. Furthermore, we have been saddled with irresponsible oil-men running the executive branch of our government.

But actually we can’t say that Congress has done nothing.

Congress passed the 2005 Energy Policy Act, mandating 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol be produced by 2012. Corn farmers were ecstatic, and promptly produced a record 6.6 billion gallons last year. The Energy Act of 2007 increased the mandate to 9 billion gallons by 2008, and ramped it up to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

So, isn’t that good? Well, unfortunately that is a big part of why food prices have gone through the roof. You remember we mentioned that grain prices were doubling and tripling.

Ninety-five percent of ethanol is produced from corn. Seventeen percent of the U.S. corn crop went to ethanol. Furthermore, producing biofuels increases pesticide use, is inefficient, does not prevent climate change and competes for land that could be used to grow food for humans. Because our government subsidizes the growth of corn for ethanol, guess which use gets precedence.

Our farm-state representatives did realize that ethanol would get them re-elected, but did not consider that growing corn for ethanol uses more resources, including natural-gas produced fertilizer, a finite resource.

So where does this all leave us? The global market answer is higher prices for commodities, food shortages, and a looming recession.

Some experts are already looking at the prospects for a new world order with resource-rich countries having the advantage.
The major energy-surplus states are few. Ten oil-rich states possess over 82 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Their rank by volume: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. Three countries have the bulk of natural gas. Russia, Iran and Qatarharbor have almost 56 percent of the world supply.

So who can cash in on the dramatic rise in global energy prices? In 2005 the oil-exporting countries collected an estimated $970 billion from importing countries. Giant investment accounts are filled with yens, dollars, and euros to be used for acquiring valuable assets around the world, including US corporations, buildings, and infrastructure.

What are we doing? Our answer is to spend $12 billion a month in Iraq, supposedly for sweet deals for American oil companies.

Should our policy be to invade them all, suck up to them, threaten them, or a combination of intelligent policies -- diplomacy, compromise and accelerating domestic research for alternative sources of energy.

Sanity would endorse the latter approach!

How have our leaders been doing so far?

Turn the "can't do" into "can do"

When did we become a “Can’t do” nation?

International problems -- we can’t seem to handle them with any degree of competency. We can’t withdraw from an ugly war without end, which is robbing us of precious human treasure and vast financial resources. We can’t avoid alienating our allies as we pursue arrogant, unilateral foreign endeavors. We can’t stop terrorists from even more intensely planning our demise.

And the “Can’t dos” are multiplying on the domestic front.

We can’t keep our passenger planes in the air for want of FAA-ignored, and overdue, maintenance. We can’t manage a vital energy policy upon which the future of our world depends. We can’t rid ourselves of corrupt forces in our leadership whose decisions and paucity of principle are plunging us into global sinkholes of intellectual, financial, and moral ruin.

We can’t stop the ruinous ramp-up of gas prices while oil companies post record profits. We can’t stop the decline in the value of the dollar while tourists have to cut short their vacations abroad. We can’t stop the rise in food prices around the world.

But we can fight a serious economic downturn by lowering interest rates to the cellar, causing inflation and further devaluation of the dollar. For average Americans, of course, the painful corollary to a devalued dollar is higher food and gas prices. But, of course, you can always sell your jewelry for its precious metals.

Don’t look for help from the government. Its money is going elsewhere.

Because trillions are being spent for a futile war, we can’t repair our crumbling infrastructure (bridges are falling); we can’t properly educate our children (California school funding is being cut drastically); we can’t provide adequate health care to even the middle class working folk. And while we spent trillions in Iraq, stuffing much of it in the hands of Bush friends, we allowed a great American city to drown and many of its people to perish.

We are now in economic recession – or worse – to a large extent, because our leaders over-indulged subprime lenders and hedge fund powers. The same arrogant, know-it-all leaders helped empower corporations to take huge portions of national wealth and income, and, in so doing, fail to share our country’s riches with American workers.

The idiocy of this policy is revealed two-fold. First, because wages and salaries have been almost stagnant in the last decade, this has prompted Americans to spend the equity of their homes, this enabled by rising house prices.

When the housing bubble burst, three interrelated phenomena – lack of financial institution liquidity, stagnant wages and dried up equity of homes – fed the current downturn. Business interests – and our leaders – ever short-term in their thinking, forgot that consumption makes up 70 percent of our GDP, and its lack is feeding the downturn – big time.

Second, the subprime vultures of Wall Street, brought their own version of carrion to our economy. The debt instruments that are backed up by bloated bodies of assets – foreclosed real estate – are now guaranteed by responsible taxpayers, the same taxpayers whose pay raises were stifled by corporations similar to Bear Stearns.

But the bailout of Bear Stearns by we taxpayers only adds insult to injury, for it is American taxpayers who have paid for neo-conservative political propaganda, helping to keep neocons in power, disbursed by Bush administration government agencies, which our money has funded and which have criminally broken their mandate to protect our own interests.

In the meantime, brazen and un-chastened neo-conservative forces still bluster dogma about how their Democratic opponents have brought this on us and how irresponsible borrowers (one of McCain’s earlier claims) have helped bring the subprime fiasco. But the truth is that much of blame can be laid at their (neo-conservative forces) doorsteps.

Their ruthless, self-serving policies crippled our political system. Their ideology and their greed hamstrung our economic system by spending money we don’t have and by lying us into a needless war. Their jingoistic arrogance alienated the rest of the world – allies and foes alike. Their short-term agenda put the war debt on our children and grandchildren. And they still control the Republican Party.

Of course, we allowed it to happen.

Conned by neo-conservative hucksters, systematically herded by the corporate media, and suckered with claims of lower taxes, leading to an aggregate of higher taxes, our goal now should be to rid ourselves of all vestiges of the corrupt neo-conservative leadership. Only then can we start fresh with team principles and team goals, remembering that this team is, and must be, composed of all Americans.

Compared with the almost eight-year Bush/neocon plunge into a troubled chasm of war, division, debt, and potential economic ruin, doesn’t this seem like a fairly easy task?

The problem of health care

Because the American health insurance industry, drug companies and the neo-conservative noise machine are against one-payer universal health care coverage, it will not happen, even with the obvious failure of the current system to deliver quality care.

How do the people feel about it? An ABC News / Washington Post poll found that Americans support universal health care 2 to 1 as long as it doesn’t mean limited doctors or waiting lists for non-emergency issues. The poll also indicated that more than half of all Americans are unsatisfied with the current states of health care in the country.

What impact does our mish-mash of coverage, non-coverage, and under-coverage have upon our economy and our well being?

In 2001, half of all bankruptcy filings were related to medical issues. From 1981 to 2001, the number of medically-related bankruptcy filings increased 2,300 percent.

Multiple sources report that excessive health care regulations and mandates are responsible for the deaths of some 22,000 Americans a year. On top of this 18,000 more annual deaths are attributed to lack of health insurance.

More than 46 million Americans go uninsured each day, 9 million of whom are children. Millions more go under-insured. The consequences of the uninsured population affect us all. Society absorbs the cost of an uninsured population such as higher hospital charges to the privately insured that help offset uncompensated costs.

Private costs, family costs, and opportunity costs are much greater that we care to imagine: ill worker productivity lost, developmental losses for children, family financial uncertainty, stress, depletion of assets, and a diminished sense of social equality and of self-respect.

On the corporate front, the burgeoning costs of health care for retired auto workers alone has helped bring American auto makers to the verge of bankruptcy. With the global economy, all of American corporations are competing with foreign businesses not weighted down with health care burdens.

The burden of health care coverage should be borne by our society not by our business interests. Most progressive countries and in the U.S., the non-partisan New American Foundation, consider health care coverage to be part of a social contract, not a business-labor contract. Indeed, all other developed countries of the world have plans that fulfill this security for all citizens.

Health care spending in the U.S. is double many other major industrial countries: almost 18 percent of our GDP, it is twice the percentage of the UK; it is twice that of Japan, and 50 percent more than Canada or France, while we are no healthier.

So what about the presidential candidates and their stands on health care? The truth is that they all give a one-payer universal health care system a very wide berth. All cower from the propaganda firestorm sure to erupt not only from the entrenched health care industry but also from the powerful neo-conservative network.

All talk universal coverage, but the John McCain plan especially is in an intellectual vacuum. His “laissez-faire” fantasy world was created by neoconservative ideology and maintained by its barking dog of dogma, George W. Bush. Touting a concept that is refuted by all available evidence, John McCain assures anyone who will listen that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone, including the uninsured.

McCain claims that his approach would harness “the power of competition to produce greater coverage for Americans,” reducing costs so that even people with pre-existing conditions could afford care. His emphasis is on cutting costs and privatizing everything, including the efficient Veterans Health Administration which providing quality care to veterans. The latter is one of the few details he provides for his plan.

We already have a predominately private coverage. All evidence indicates that private plans attempt to cover only the healthy, who provide premiums but need no benefits. McCain himself would not be covered by any plan he touts, for he has had cancer in the past.

Obama's plan retains the private insurance system but injects additional money to pay for expanding coverage. Those who can't afford coverage would get a subsidy on a sliding scale depending on their income, and virtually all businesses would have to share in the cost of coverage for their workers. But his plan is not mandatory.

Hillary Clinton’s plan requires everyone to get health insurance, subsidized by employers and the government; pay for it by rolling back tax cuts for households earning over $250,000 and savings in the existing system. Her plan wants to make health insurance mandatory but calls for new options for buying private or public insurance at affordable rates.

As we can see not one of the candidates will touch a single-payer, universal coverage system. Hillary Clinton was almost scourged with her 1992 plan during Bill Clinton’s first term. She is not apt to provide any similar target. But her plan does come closest to universal coverage and perhaps leaves an open door toward a public insurance plan.

The bitter truth is that the huge costs for health care will continue, ballooned by huge administrative costs, the incentive for private providers to drop the unhealthy will continue, the army of uninsured and under-insured could take a small drop, and the mountain of paper, regulations, ambiguities, and insanities that are a requisite part of our fractured system will increase.

The profit-motivated providers would blithely continue the current dysfunctional system: the sick cast aside, the young rejecting coverage due to sky-high premiums, the poor using emergency rooms – if any can be found – and fewer employees providing fewer benefits with rising co-pays. The priority for the private health care industry and the high-flying drug companies is profit while both are profusely represented by high-price lobbyists who still write laws for members of Congress.

For privatized health care, profit is the motive. Everyone’s right to health care, involving a sane and compassionate system, is simply irrelevant.

For neo-conservative operatives, all issues are reduced to power, which they justify by citing their assured possession of the Truth. Rather than compromise any issues, they would destroy the foundations of our democracy, though they don’t see it that way.

The last eight years have helped define their truth: rule by the elite with savagely enforced loyalty among party members, unilateral, imperialistic foreign policy, and dominance of corporate interests.

A bankrupt neo-conservative ideology and the current health insurance powers will kill a truly universal health care system, a system that must be some form of a public one-payer system which cover all, regardless of good or bad health.

Maverick lost in the neocon forest

The whole McCain persona is not moderate, and is truly not even maverick. The John McCain persona is most aptly described as right-wing with moderate warps and maverick feints.

The John McCain of today is not the John McCain of eight years ago. Simply put, his maverick bent is bent. He heroically withstood the tortures of the Viet Cong prison. But his thirst for the power of the presidency gives him an expeditious bow to Bush and an awkward allegiance to Republican dogma.

Thus, there is a dissonance to John McCain, his campaign and his speeches. It reminds you of the opening strains of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Warped video: discordant music, slow-motion distortion of form and meaning.

Just when his foreign policy speeches start to make sense, one suspects that neocon propaganda twists his reason toward rants: claiming that Democrats are selling out to al Qaeda dominance.

Neocons still own the Republican Party, and to be its candidate McCain must balance on the beam of Bush peace propaganda, fear-mongering, and the Bush war against terrorism. But McCain statements, especially 100 years of war, seem to lean even more toward militancy than even Bush. When denying the intent of his own words, McCain repeatedly evokes the long-term occupations of Korea, Japan, Germany or Kuwait.

My recent memory of McCain, Iraq, and Iran is this succession of scenes: his charge of Iran training Al Qaeda, an almost real-time correction by Joe Lieberman, then McCain substituting the word extremist for Al Qaeda, then McCain changing the word again to Al Qaeda. I must admit that I guessed engagement in an outright lie (in the Bush tradition), but then wondered about a senior moment.

A few days back Joe Klein gave McCain kudos regarding his March 26th foreign policy speech. In this speech, Joe said that McCain refrained from his foolish, inaccurate "Al-Qaeda-is-Gonna-Take-Over" rhetoric of the recent past, and gave a reasonable and balanced approach in Iraq.

Now, we all remember the media’s pardon of George W. Bush’s sophomoric speeches, lauding his achievement relative to his usual mediocre performances. The media also helped to paint Bush as moderate and bought his compassionate conservative tripe when most of us knew better. So Joe Klein’s kudos don’t impress me.

Then there is domestic policy, or the total absence of it. Currently it is a combination of neocon ideology, the Adam Smith market economy he has overheard from other neocons, and the need to cultivate Wall Street moguls. McCain is especially malleable here because, by his own admission, he knows little about economics.

Once upon a time he decried the Bush tax cuts. Now he votes to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes. How will he balance the budget and maintain our $3 trillion war? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks, he stated, which are molehills next to the mountain of Bush debt. One wonders if he misleads or is ill-informed.

By his own admission, he has no clue about economics, but McCain does know moralizing. His stern message to homeowners under duress includes: “It is not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly.”

If you are among the 4 million homeowners who are tanking, hide your heads and emulate the 76 million who are “working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets.” McCain failed to directly chide Countrywide Financial or Bear Stearns.

But he did say that the federal government ought to do something about getting regulations off the back of the financial markets and concluded with a call to reduce the corporate tax rate (the worn-out Bush mantra).

Economists and objective analysts who have watched unregulated financial markets drag the world’s economy into the muck of their own greed-fest, must be getting whiplash trying to follow the seemingly uninformed illogic of McCain’s proposal to de-regulate more.

According to CNN reports, he is working on new solutions to our economic travail. Considering his lack of grasp of the subprime situation in particular and the economy in general, one hopes he has added new knowledge to his staff of economic advisors.

Our tanking economy shows that the invisible hand (free market in Adam Smith terms) that neocons tout seems to be held (constrained / broken / monopolized) by irresponsible people, financial markets and consumers alike. We should not hold our breath for his solutions.

On the same CNN program, Senator Dodd stated that we can’t wait for his new solutions to the subprime crisis.

Even on social issues the maverick vein is gone. McCain once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance." Late last year he met with Falwell and since then his positions seem friendlier to the religious right. A case in point is his support of an extremist anti-abortion law in South Dakota.

Like Bush, McCain is trying to appear moderate during his general election run, which he gets to start early due to the winner-take-all Republican primaries. And like Bush, the media permits him to play the pretend game of being a moderate.

If the media bothered to check his voting record it would find the truth. A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.

If due to the prolonged battle for the Democratic nomination, McCain manages to prevail, it would truly be a case of Bush III, somewhat of a Bush clone, just as plutocratic, just as warlike – maybe even more, and just as ignorant about the economy and economics.