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What a Local Paper Looks Like

We all tune/dial up/surf/click on/re-direct to the NYT so often that it becomes, without our even realizing it, natural for us to project ourselves onto the grandest scale. And while there’s little wrong with that – and so along as the NYT remains the best source of actually reporting – our relationship to local news sees a thoroughgoing change and our national paper becomes another way we lose local connections; we have to pan out now just to select the spots where we pan back in.

And not just news, obviously, but issues become obscured when only viewed through a wide-angle prism. While I wouldn’t suggest we need to be led by any simple wisdoms of uniquely local warranty, and hope to avoid the condescending loyalty to any kind of flyover provincialism, we should realize that many national reporters/columnists strive to lead us back to these very perspectives, albeit from a distant, centralized point of entry.

By just this sort of scaling and re-scaling, you can see how things might get misconstrued or confused, accidentally or otherwise, and generally difficult to discern, much less do anything.

But looking at the way things might and often do happen – on issues related to food, health care or transportation just to name three – the power of motion is all local. Have a look below at this unsigned, front page admonition on a new health department, and a couple of things jump out, even beyond the ‘reality show with actual people’ category. On this scale, it seems that no amount of agitation against ‘socialized this’ or ‘abstinence that’ would or could make any sense. Imagine that, with or without all caps.

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What a Local Paper Looks Like

We all tune/dial up/surf/click on/re-direct to the NYT so often that it becomes, without our even realizing it, natural for us to project ourselves onto the grandest scale. And while there’s little wrong with that – and so along as the NYT remains the best source of actually reporting – our relationship to local news sees a thoroughgoing change and our national paper becomes another way we lose local connections; we have to pan out now just to select the spots where we pan back in.

And not just news, obviously, but issues become obscured when only viewed through a wide-angle prism. While I wouldn’t suggest we need to be led by any simple wisdoms of uniquely local warranty, and hope to avoid the condescending loyalty to any kind of flyover provincialism, we should realize that many national reporters/columnists strive to lead us back to these very perspectives, albeit from a distant, centralized point of entry.

By just this sort of scaling and re-scaling, you can see how things might get misconstrued or confused, accidentally or otherwise, and generally difficult to discern, much less do anything.

But looking at the way things might and often do happen – on issues related to food, health care or transportation just to name three – the power of motion is all local. Have a look below at this unsigned, front page admonition on a new health department, and a couple of things jump out, even beyond the ‘reality show with actual people’ category. On this scale, it seems that no amount of agitation against ‘socialized this’ or ‘abstinence that’ would or could make any sense. Imagine that, with or without all caps.

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A Fool and His Primer

So… mrs. green and I speak often about how newspapers will be able to support themselves going forward, now that their revenue model has gone up in Craig’s List smoke. The supposition is that at some point, through collusion or other such cartel-like agreement, the larger and dependable online sources of actual reporting will have to start charging for content. This allows that some of them will be able to charge for content, with the inferred assumption that this is true as long as they don’t destroy their brand.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A ‘LIGHT-SWITCH TAX’…. In an apparent effort to be an even more shameless hack, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) argues in a Washington Post op-ed today that “all American families will get stuck with a new ‘light-switch tax’ on electricity bills that is in the president’s budget.”

It’s not just Gregg. While President Obama cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans, a standard Republican talking point is that Obama is also raising taxes on everyone who uses electricity. The new GOP catch phrase popped up about a week ago, when the House Republican Conference said in a press release that the administration supports “a light switch tax that would cost every American household $3,128 a year.”

As is too often the case, the difference between Republican rhetoric and reality is overwhelming.

The extent to which established and dependable media sources commit to undermining their brand will have as much effect on their long-term viability as the bad decision-making of the corporate owners.

Also note the tendentious application of tax rhetoric to what is, sad to say, only an imagined attempt to create incentives to influence energy demand. It’s like the ‘death tax’ BS. Republicans can and do choose to see everything through the prism of taxes, but this childlike construct requires a grand gesture at the outset – primarily setting up the government as some separate, antagonistic entity, out to get you and your hard-earned winnings.

In the interest of brevity, a foolish and naive primer: We support the country, literally, by funding the government. It’s patriotic, sure, but also practical. We use it for all kinds of things we can and do disagree about – fighting wars, picking up the trash, putting out fires, educating our youngsters. Yet, through the magic of funding activities like these, we discover the handy ability to encourage or discourage behaviors by charging ourselves more or less for doing or not doing certain things – from littering to using lead paint, for example, but also having children, buying a home.

So despite this ‘light-switch tax’ scare-mongering, and it will get worse, taxing carbon emissions will be the route away from carbon-centric energy sources and toward affordable renewable energy. Whatever the costs, we will create a funding regimen that ultimately rewards sustainability. That’s not optimism – it’s what the system is supposed to do. The country is us – we fund the government.

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Ugly Green Ties to the Past

Not that one, specifically, but not altogether different, either.

I’m as skeptical as anybody about clean coal, but as a fan, of sorts, of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, I’m willing to give him and cc its due when he goes to links to take it seriously. Following routes we ostensibly mistrust, after all, is what open mindedness is about, n’Green pas?

This is all concerns FutureGen, a public-private partnership to build a first-of-its-kind coal-fueled, near-zero emissions power plant.

The article somehow manages to wax agnostic about the merits of living with the contradictions of the above statement.

Stephanie Mueller, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy, issued a statement after Monday’s meeting leaving no doubt about Chu’s interest. “Secretary Chu believes that the FutureGen proposal has real merit,” Mueller said. “In the coming weeks, the department will be working with the Alliance and members of Congress to strengthen the proposal and try to reach agreement on a path forward.”

If the project is revived, it will have plenty of company internationally. Three similar IGCC projects figure among a dozen schemes that European leaders last month deemed eligible to compete for €1 billion in stimulus funds set aside to support commercial-scale application of CCS in coal-fired power plants. Of those projects, six will be selected to receive funding. Meanwhile, a consortium of Chinese power generators has initiated construction of the GreenGen project, which was inspired by FutureGen.

I cringed repeatedly about Obama’s invocation of cc on the campaign trail; it sounded exactly like the dreamy sort of pandering with which his critics have tried to paint him, to little effect thus far. But here comes the administration again, continuing to strike a serious posture with an expensive, non-serious solution.

The idea of outfitting new coal-fired power plants with carbon storage and sequestration technology should be a minimal point of entry into our energy supply; that the coal industry can and does tout this as the next greatest thing speaks to bar height for the industry and the candle power of politicians as much as anything. As we have said, the cheapest power plants are the ones we don’t have to build. Measures to flatten demand should at least accompany gargantuan efforts to make a dirty power clean.

And even on 4/1 this is not a joke.

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Crisis parody

More good examples for new and improved corporate logos, here.

Sometimes ridicule goes a long way, unless the targets (as I’ve come upon recently – and locally) insist on being deliberately obtuse such that the meaning of your critique continues to (magically) escape them. Of course, I accept this failure as none other than my own.

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Two Left Interwebbed Feet

The maelstrom and convulsion we entered some time ago, which we have been so slow to notice even as the  passing scenery has begun to repeat like the same bunch of clouds and mountains, documented in the incredibly shrinking newspaper sense, here. Maybe cartoon language is one of the few we still understand. It’s got to have something to do with that ‘all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten’ sort of thing. If that’s true, good for you. Anyway, that’s an excellent piece above, so thanks, Andy.

You might wonder, and I can only hope you do, why the clockwise newspaper drain swirl, financial melt and eco/energy colossus are all coming of age at the same time. It could make you curious about what we’ve been feeding them. Born mostly at about the same time – say at or near about the time governments began insuring East India companies in their forays into the New World – all of our societal sub-structures are breaking up into mini ice floes, drifting out to Dieu knows where, as we struggle with how to tie them together again. As much as that might be an unfortunate metaphor, it can’t help but seem – even to a kindergartener – like practice for something.

To that end, and pardon the pun, it’s always better take in a geographer-anthropologist matinee:

PAUL SOLMAN: Of all the cultures you’ve studied that have tried to deal with severe economic dislocations, what’s the marker of resiliency?

JARED DIAMOND: It seems to me that one of the predictors of a happy versus an unhappy outcome has to do with the role of the elite or the decision-makers or the politicians or the rich people within the society.

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they’re motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they’re likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

That last bit via the Poorman.

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The mall is flat

That title is stolen from Atrios, who refers to him as Little Tommy Friedman, age 9. I couldn’t agree more. Besides being married to a billionaire mall developer, he’s also a jingoist of the first order, using his NYT column to rhetorically taunt the Serbians back in the mid-90’s: “You want 1940? We’ll give you 1940. How about 1540? or 1340?” Implying that we would bomb them back to some past age. Excellent, Tommy.

Vanity Fair now has Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions and it’s a passable list, reflective of the intellect that allows him to breeze past CNBC producers straight to the pineapple daiquiris in the green room. Though this list of brutishly simplistic conclusions based on counter-intuitive and patronizing over-extrapolations of routine activity in the developing world leaves out some doozies, the thing about Friedman that almost makes my head explode is the seemingly highest-regard in which he is held by academics, many of whom I know personally. I just don’t get it that they don’t get it. Maybe the flat world idea is just too easy and useful to let pass despite its fundamental flaw, and so they can’t. It’s truly one of the great mysteries of my proximity to academia. But I think he essentially misunderstood the cabbie or whomever it was in Bangalore that first told him that line. And now it’s everywhere. And it’s truly stupid.

At least he makes our usual question easier to answer.

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What does 6.2% mean?

I can dig it when the Grey Lady steals my construct.

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 6.2 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of 2008. This was bad news, but some journalists have exaggerated the finding merely by misreading the report.

That post and graph is by a UChicago economist. Another economist I read regularly is Brad DeLong at Berkeley (who hopefully will be taking academic leave to work at the Treasury department very soon). Anyway, this post reminds me of something I heard DeLong say in a NPR essay, I think yesterday. He was talking about all the bad news that’s out there, about the fixation on the stock market as an indicator, the unemployment numbers, the CPI… and he was saying that its enough to make us all worried and scared. But he pointed out that because of certain trends in the fundamentals of the economy (which have been out of whack for several years, really), the stock market should be going down. And though we’ve known about most all of these trends and statistics since last fall, the news media has been more all over them of late. So while they are sufficiently dire that we should be worried and scared, we shouldn’t be more worried and scared than we were in December just because the news media is finally rending their garments.

But… check out DeLong; he has a great running gag (except its not so funny) about the Washington Post Death Watch that should serve him well when/if he gets back to DC.

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le mensonge dans une bouteille

Bastardized phonyms using a different language that has a close but completely different meaning… draw comparisons where appropriate. Working on this week’s column, I’m seeing a route through to making the point that

Is there any doubt that most of the talking heads on cable, along with an uncomfortable ratio of the professional politicians they report and comment on, do not know what they’re talking about when it comes to the causes for and ways out of our economic recession?

And I come back to the ‘fools or liars’ construct, where your interlocutor (or presidential candidate –  candidate McCain was offering something up seemingly every other day this summer and twice on weekends) offers a point predicated on only one of two possibilities – either he’s a fool or he thinks you are.

And the trends continue, unabated. Krugman today, on the Treasury plans to make low-interest, non-recourse loans to lure private investors into buying bad assets:

And the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?

I don’t know which possibility is worse.

And this

ABC News reports on “upper-income taxpayers” who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.

According to ABC, one attorney “plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.”  According to the attorney: “We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00.”  ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.

This is stunningly wrong.

The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate.  If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.

But that isn’t actually how income tax works.

And that’s just today… this morning, actually. Please make it stop. Has anybody seen the bridge?

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Sunday odds and ends

So, I notice that the print version of my current Flagpole column that’s been out for a few days has not been made available online; maybe they’ve got some kind of blockage in their intertubes. Can’t say for sure. Look for further erratic behavior on this front. Newspapers are in trouble if you haven’t heard.

So is the South, with regard to new targets for renewable energy, apparently. Why the congressman won’t include the rest of the statement, that the South doesn’t have enough renewable energy sources if demand continues to spiral upward and onward is anybody’s guess. Thanks Ben, for the heads up.

There’s more on this and other issues on Georgia Public Broadcasting this afternoon. I tend to have a way of saying things people don’t like, so I’m sure there will be a little something for everybody.

Update. The internets are nothing if not self-correcting – and at lightning speed. New Flagpole column is here.