What does Foreclosure Fraud mean? Looky-see.
Squaring the War Circle
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuel.
Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.
What’s next, less wars? I guess there are worse things – the Defense department did build the internet, even if it was just for Al Gore at first. So now they’ll scale up a renewable energy package in record time for the greatest fighting machine the world has ever known. Maybe, in the land hopeful unintended consequences, they’ll realize they/we don’t need to spend that much on armaments after all. That dropping bombs on people continually is not the path to their hearts and minds – well, not in a good way. But will we make the connection of our ways to our means through a transformation of our might?
Reminds me of that Churchill quote.
Objective Annihilation
As objective annihilation passes into more or less likely scenarios dependent on what actions we take – vs. other scenarios (Cold War) which had to take into account the actions others might take against us, we begin to look for signals about how the culture is handling the ‘actions we take’ thing. In the round, it’s largely what this blog is, or should be, about.
Certainly, many now say that terrorists belong to the later scenario outlined above. But their actions have done nothing if not emphasize their belief in the former as the best way to bring western society to its knees.
But whether we’re taking measures to change things, and whether these even measures matter, becomes a matter of great concern, locally but especially to corporate business interests highly invested in selling us things. The perceptions of either might even be considered more important than the answer on both, at least to these larger, multi-tentacled entities.
Which is all to ask, what do people believe about corporate attempts/postures on ‘going green’? Even that term is still evolving, slower than we’d like, of course – we want to see change in 140 characters or we’re convinced it isn’t happening. But it is, maybe becoming more plain and tangible or more insidious, depending on how you brew your cynicism.
But is it still growing, or was it just a fashion and have we seen the zenith of eco-concern? (Annihilation vogue?) This is a real question, pointing to perception beyond the actual events. The hockey stick has been re-confirmed again, for example, but the constant badgering of the fossil fuel confederate right wing has an affect. Most Republicans now believe the president is a Muslim, after all.
The question of ‘do you think it’s working’ confers a much more nefarious kind of survey.
Truly Rapid Transit
While our friends on the right keeping yelling about how backwards, unsafe and unfreedom it is to not sit in your car alone and imbibe talk radio, our friends on the Right Bank are doing something other than idling on the way to work.
Yet the Réseau Primaire de Transport du Grand Paris (primary transport network of greater Paris) may be coming to life. This week, the government opened public debate on the project, revealing the extensive studies it has completed on potential alignments for the rail corridors, including proposed station sites. And the Sarkozy Administration has committed to €4 billion to the Société du Grand Paris, the semi-autonomous organization that will build the project and invest in eight major development sites that will have prime access to the network.
If the program is approved, the Société would take on 40 years of debt financing to sponsor the €21.4-23.5 cost, to be paid back mostly through deals made on real estate in station areas.
The project would encompass 155 km (96 miles) of new lines that would be added to the existing automated 5.5-mile Line 14 Metro that currently runs along a southeast-northwest route through Paris. Three routes would be offered: a 50 km Blue Line from Orly Airport to Charles de Gaulle Airport, via the existing Line 14; a 75 km Green Line from Orly Airport to Charles de Gaulle Airport, via the La Défense financial district west of Paris (with 21 km shared with the Blue Line); and a 60 km Red Line from La Défense to Le Bourget Airport, via the southern and eastern suburbs. Commute times for suburban residents hoping to reach destinations outside of Paris will be decreased significantly, with average train speeds a very respectable 40 mph thanks to few stations (give or take 40, depending on the final alignment chosen) and very high frequencies thanks to automation. At peak hours on some segments, trains will arrived every 85 seconds.
As Atrios points out, this project will cost about three months of Afghanistan, plus you get the trains at the end. And less dead people, at least theoretically.
And though that hurts, it’s not the real kicker. No, the further insult here is the constant badgering by the craven morons standing guard against this kind of progress. To hear mass transit constantly demonized in the U.S., one might think that the idea of not getting everywhere by private car represents the end of civilization as we know it. Well, you know what? It would! And not a moment too soon. Something’s got to change. But this is precisely where our confederate republican brethren have drawn the line – in calling this kind of change exactly what it is and opposing it for that very reason.
Maddening. But speaking of remaining calm in the face of staggering idiocy, the neighborhood around the Chatelet stop is a nice area.
Billions of Ways to Be Wrong
When you’ve got enough of it, green means being able to influence elections, muddy the water on issues of the day, even fund fake grassroots movements, aka Tea Parties (R.I.P), all to stoke your corporate agenda while you call it libertarianism. Huzzah! Jane Mayer has a well-written and well-reported piece in The New Yorker on the Brothers Koch and their exploits. You should read it all; it’s like contemporary American history in the making:
In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”
I’m as guilty as anyone of narrowing my focus at times and missing the big picture. But the big picture is huge and often difficult to grasp, and it’s good to be reminded that it’s not conspiratorial to think know that some people with means count on this, too, as just another tool in the pouch. Remind yourself that it takes some work to stay informed, that the 1st amendment is a kind of cautionary note, freedom in reverse – not to do nothing, but a responsibility to do more. Way more. Just to find out what you need to know. Especially when we’re as peopled with highly motivated oligarchs as we are. Besides the many other things they are, the Kochs’ activities equal exhibit A for the estate tax. 99.3% at least.
Coming Soon
Very dour outlook in Nevada.
The decay in Vegas doesn’t stay there: It reverberates throughout the state. “Coming Soon” signs have been pulled down across the city, because nothing is coming soon other than more foreclosures. The Nevada landscape is pockmarked by empty condos and casinos, some of them fully built and sitting there empty, others are shells frozen in time. When analysts talk abstractly about Wall Street sucking capital out of the real economy, these stalled construction projects are the on-the-ground reality. “60% Reduced Prices” promises one empty condo development.
The $3.1 billion Fontainebleau Las Vegas construction project sits nearly complete but the lender pulled out and everybody is suing everybody else. The first Ritz-Carlton in the company’s history to shut down is in Las Vegas.
And as the article title asserts, this is the future for much of the country. I wish I could say or you could think that this is wholly attributable to the economic recession and unrelated to the causes underpinning our crisis of ecology, but we can’t. Unsustainable growth, over-building, mindless reliance on cheap materials and energy, exacerbating resource scarcity… it’s all there. There is greed but also ambivalence about consequences that is too obvious to ignore, that allows for the kinds of rapacious development that built Las Vegas into what it is – which is a gilded yet crumbling metropolis, in the desert, no less. The human toll is tragic and cannot be quantified only by the number of empty subdivisions, but the region’s supposed rebound will be divined in corporate dividends and ephemera like new housing starts. Might as well be reading entrails.
And on top of it all… Fontainebleau? Really?
Birth of a Slogan
Largest Tax increase ever? Allow the Bush tax cuts lapse? Job-killing tax hike? But what does it mean?
Given the uncertainty of the Senate outcome, the strategy offers the GOP a chance to accuse Democrats of planning to raise taxes on most Americans, by allowing all the Bush tax cuts to lapse. The cuts, passed in 2001 and 2003, will expire on Jan. 1, 2011, unless Congress passes legislation to extend them.
Except that they lie. Check it.
They only way Bush/Cheney could get them passed in the first place was accounting tricks. This was the main one. Which is not to say they/we won’t pass a “fix” this fall. Only that we/they shouldn’t.
Fringe-Fi
So… even for an election season, the politics of the moment are coming unhinged; just read the last ten or twelve posts at TPM, a supposedly moderate newsy site, and you’ll see how covering the right is becoming a circus of crazy. Conventional thinking is gelling around the notions that
a) the Republican Party is the Tea Party
and b) whatever it’s called the GOP Confederate Party needs to disappear, and/or be replaced by something other than either one of those, for the good of the country.
But that’s… a bit of crazy in its own right, and we could definitely be being governed by majorities of those freaks (think endless investigations of trivial scandals and government shutdowns) after this fall. Nonetheless… Green. What do it mean? How about your crappy internet service? Don’t think its so crappy?
The Connectivity Scorecard is, as Stacey Higginbotham reports for GigaOM, a favorite measure of the telecom industry, since it paints the America in a particularly favorable light.
The Scorecard looks not just at broadband infrastructure, but also at how a country uses its broadband, and how much that helps its economy. So while the United States has less and slower broadband than many Asian and European countries, it was the top rated country on the Scorecard until this year.
But as this chart emphasizes, U.S. broadband is far less advanced than that of leading countries. Despite ranking the United States second, the report states: “While it has significantly more fiber and DOCSIS 3.07 deployment than most of Western Europe, US infrastructure is uneven, and the gap with respect to Asian economies and even Sweden and the Netherlands remains substantial.”
Is there a connection? Sorry. Expect more. Before it becomes a corporate logo. Damn.
Mmmm… Complex… Issues
Why not use cartoons instead of charts and graphs to make your point? Use whatever you want.
Annie Leonard used to spout jargon. She reveled in the sort of geek-speak that glazes your eyeballs.
Externalized costs, paradigm shifts, the precautionary principle, extended producer responsibility.
That was before she discovered cartoons.
Today the 45-year-old Berkeley activist is America’s pitchperson for a new style of environmental message. Out with boring PowerPoints and turgid reports; in with witty videos that explain complex issues in digestible terms.
M’kay. All good. Instead of being a boring old scold… entertain and scintillate with the latest and the gravest.
In the past 2 1/2 years, more than 12 million people worldwide have viewed Leonard’s animated Web video, “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute expose of humanity’s wasteful ways. It has been translated into more than 15 languages and has spawned a book of the same name, published on recycled paper with soy ink.
Leonard recently launched “The Story of Bottled Water,” a video about how clever marketing turned a freely available commodity — tap water — into a source of profit and pollution, and “The Story of Cap and Trade,” her take on how carbon trading undermines efforts to curb global warming.
“The Story of Cosmetics,” about toxicity in personal care products, will go live July 21. Coming this fall: “The Story of Electronics,” on planned obsolescence and pollutants in computers and cellphones.
Uh huh. I see. Taking the backdoor route to Old Scoldsville, eh? Nice one. But I have a feeling these stories themselves won’t be nearly as insightful about waste nor cause as many people to pause and think about their own consumption as will the many ham-fisted attempts to paint her as a marxist or a communist by well-meaning libertarian ignorati. Talk about enlightening.
Attention to the Deficit Disorder
Whenever you hear anyone belabor, lament or just plain whine about how high taxes are and how we’ve got to, just got to, take care of the deficit or else all their sweet little baby prayers will never be answered, just go ahead and call their bluff. Because the simplest argument is always the best one.
“[Y]ou should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes,” Jon Kyl said on Fox News Sunday. “Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to — if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.”
What he’s admitting is that it’s okay to cut the estate tax, nevah (evah) mind the deficit, and to eliminate capital gains taxes and to treat shareholder dividends as anything but taxable income but, but any tax relief at the lower end of the economic pyramid must always be balanced with spending cuts. It’s crazy, incoherent, chauvinistic classism not at its best but at its most American, self-selving finest, a brand that wealthy people have been able to obscure with moral concerns about federal budget deficits for at least thirty fifty years. And now it greatly accepted as gospel, except that none of it is true.
Understand the laziness dodge, the immorality of budget deficits and the government keeping its hands of your money, because they are all of a piece. The gentle creatures care nothing about the supposed deficit and will balloon it with tax cuts as soon as they are proposed. It’s another euphemism, aided by the (linguistic) fact that keeping up with the green is complicated.