See, here’s the problem — You don’t want to demonize something that people use almost every day. Take plastic bags, for example. We can see the plastic bags. They look harmless enough. They’re small. They’re thin. It’s clear they’ve done all they can to minimize the amount of material they’re using. And, most importantly, they’re entrenched in the mind as a benign form of convenience. So we use some plastic bags? So what?

Now comes along Mr. Ivory Tower Environmentalist… “Plastic bags are bad for the environment!”, he shouts. “They must be banned!! Banned, I tell you!”

Ok, let’s hold on there a second, Mr. Envirogeek. Although what you’re saying is probably true. I actually don’t doubt it for a second that the accumulation of plastic bags is bad for the
environment. But, think about what you’re doing. You’re demonizing something they everyone views as harmless. What you’re doing isn’t a lot different from walking into a stranger’s house, pointing at their TV, yelling “TV BAD!!!”, fishing your tinfoil hat out of your purse, throwing it on while you run for the door. This is how a lot of people see you.

This obviously damages the credibility of the environmentalist movement a great deal. There is a significant risk related to the “crying wolf” factor. I don’t care how right you are. If you’re net effect is to make people less trusting of environmentalists, you’re doing us all a disservice.

More on nuclear power in a future post.

So, with that, I wish you the best of health and good luck. Take it easy out there!

We need to find ways to make energy efficiency and ecologically-
friendly decisions the cheapest, de-facto non-decisions to make. We need to *eliminate* the decision-making process from our path to success. Most of us already have way too much to worry about.

Because of their own self-inflicted boundaries and limitations, conservatives are genuinely “less free” than liberals. This makes the freedoms and liberties that they do afford themselves far more valuable, at least in their own mind.

See more here: http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/the_real_differ.php

Ever heard of “ Spiral Dynamics”? Very cool stuff integrated into Ken Wilber’s work and developed by Don Beck and Chris Cowan from the work of Clare Graves. (That’s a mouthful!

Here’s the quick overview:

People and cultures go through different stages of development. The Spiral guys like to color-code them to make it easier to keep track. It goes like this:

RED. Think: Terrible twos. Suicide bombers. I’ll blow you up if you piss me off. (Yikes!)

BLUE. Think: Ten Commandments. Fundamentalist anything. Rules are paramount. Literal interpretations of the Bible are absolutely (God damnit!!) correct. Ahem.

ORANGE. Think: Wall Street. Academia. Science and ambition are key here.

GREEN. Think: Environmentalism. Pluralism. All is one. Non-violent.

So, the idea is that we all (necessarily according to the spiral guys!) evolve through different stages of development. All of those stages above are part of what they call the “first tier.” Here’s the funny thing about those “first tier” perspectives: they’re all convinced they’re 100% right. It’s a big food fight.

GREEN looks at ORANGE and says, “You greedy capitalists!!! You’re good for nothing and totally destroying our planet! And, my non-violent self HATES you!”

ORANGE looks at GREEN and says, “You tree-hugging, New Agey hippies!! Get a job and contribute to the economy, will ya?!? And quit gazing at those crystals.”

BLUE looks at everyone and says, “You’re all going to hell because you don’t believe in [insert favorite God here], God damnit!!”

RED looks at everyone and says, “*%^& you!!! I’m blowing you up.”

Everything is “either, or.” No one can see the validity of the other perspectives. Not so good.

The ideal? Let’s consciously evolve as individuals and as a culture to a “second-tier” level of consciousness. Here, for the first time, we can hold multiple perspectives. We can see that, in Ken Wilber’s words, “No one is smart enough to be 100% wrong.”

What’s that look like? Well, you can see the truth in the need to take care of our environment AND the need for a powerful economy AND the need for rules and regulations AND the need to take aggressive action when the situation demands it.

Every stage has a PARTIAL truth. To embrace the whole we need to transcend AND include. Powerful. Very powerful.

Now, notice that each level transcends the prior. However, it wasn’t until we reached the “second tier” that we were able to transcend AND INCLUDE the prior levels of development. You see how much trouble we get into when we try to transcend and EXCLUDE prior levels of development? I mean, food fights are fun on occasion, but every moment of our lives? Not so cool.

Transcend. AND Include. (Pretty, please. With agave on top. Thank you.

“Try and think of a government program that actually works”

There are a couple of problems with this idea. First of all, it’s not a question of whether the program works or not. It’s a question of whether it works better than a privatized program would work, and if the government program has the potential to be improved. No program is perfect. And, it is absolutely incorrect to assume that just because a government program “doesn’t work” a private program would work better.  Moreover, people tend to focus on the negatives — the flaws with programs rather than on their successes.  So, it’s relatively easy to declare “Well, I just can’t think of one!  They’re all riddled with problems!”  Well, of course they’re all riddled with problems.  These are complicated issues we’re trying to solve.

Understanding when a government program is appropriate and when it is now doesn’t have to be terribly complicated, however. Programs that obviously aren’t and shouldn’t be profitable have to be either run by the government and/or a non-profit and/or heavily regulated. Public utilities, for instance, should not and cannot be allowed to raise our utility rates willy nilly as commodity prices fluctuate on Wall Street. That would be a disaster. Utilities are also a natural monopoly. Their economies of scale aren’t self-limiting. The bigger a utility is, the more cheaply they can produce and deliver power. It is more expensive for multiple entities to produce power and deliver it. Therefore, utility rates are set by the government and the industry is heavily regulated. They tried to deregulate the power industry here in California. It was a disaster. Enron raped us by jacking up the utility rates to whatever level they could get away with. And it was all legal. Gov Gray Davis paid for this with his career. Now instead we have a former bodybuilding actor, who spent the vast majority of his life learning about things other than government and politics, running the state of California. Why? Because he was the most popular candidate in the “other” political party. Not because we were sane and we chose to evaluate the problem and identify the candidate with the best solution. Because at the time “Gray Davis” = “Democrat” = “Bad”. “Arnold Schwarzenegger” = “Republican” = “Better”. That’s the extent of most swing voters’ thinking. You didn’t do a good enough job this time? I’m going to vote for “the other guy” now. It’s ignorant, black and white, ill-considered thinking.

It’s important not to lose sight of this. Some “industries” are naturally better-suited to be private. Computers, for instance. Cars. Any consumer product that is sold on a market, subject to the forces of supply and demand. Perfect things to be produced and sold by private entities that compete with each other.

Health insurance is a natural monopoly. The bigger the pool of risk-sharing, the more successful the entity can be. An insurance company with 1,000 customers would go broke if 10 of them got very sick. It’s more efficient to spread the risk over the broadest possible pool of enrollees. This is why single payer programs are so popular in countries that don’t have the same retarded political system that we do, which allows lobbyists to heavily influence policy. Currently health insurance is VERY profitable. They take as much as they can get away with taking, and pay out as little as possible. To be sure, health insurance is a public health issue and should be a public service. We shouldn’t be catapulting people into bankruptcy and denying them care when they get very sick, regardless of whether they have insurance or not. THIS BILL CORRECTS THAT. And, that is huge. (Unless the insurance companies find a way to weasel out of it, which I’m sure they will try to do.)

So, to tie up this point before we get back into government programs that work… Some “industries” are natural monopolies. Some are inherently unprofitable. It’s very difficult, for instance, to make public education profitable and therefore it absolutely has to be funded by the government. Some charitable non-profit organizations are also pretty good at providing education. And, many of them charge outrageous tuition. That is a shame. Because it basically means that having more money gets you better-educated. We should be doing a better job of educating the poor. But, that’s not what the people with money and power want. They want the population to stay ignorant and uninformed, so they can perpetuate their money and power party.

But, back to natural monopolies… and public services. A common argument against privatization is police and fire. How would you like it if the fire department checked your homeowner’s insurance before they responded to your fire? If they decided the damage would be too extensive and you wouldn’t be able to pay your fire damage prevention bill, they wouldn’t put out your fire. This happens (or was happening) every day, in hospitals around the country. THIS BILL FIXES THIS PROBLEM. (Unless the insurance companies find a way to weasel out of it, which I’m sure they will try to do.)

I keep getting side-tracked… Public services… Some “industries” are best thought of as public services — police, fire, utilities… Things that everyone needs, with varying frequency, and provide a strong public benefit. These things should not ever be privatized. Not necessarily because you couldn’t ever make a profit doing them — Monopolies can make enormous profits — but because you SHOULDN’T make a profit doing them. This is the crux of one of the biggest moral dilemmas in our society. Republicans generally think that you should make everything subject to market forces (or “natural selection”). This works for some things (cars, computers, etc.) But, this is an absolutely brutal and amoral way of looking at the world if you apply it to everything. Liberals, on the other hand, are much better about this. “Sick people should be healed.” Etc.

By the way, how are enjoying your student loan payments? I bet you might be open to considering a more European-like system of higher education where the universities are heavily subsidized by the government right about now, wouldn’t you?

And with that, here is a list of government programs that work…

This is always controversial — largely because it’s a complex cost-benefit analysis and there are always winners and losers — and because of what I said before. That it’s really a matter of whether the government version is and can be better than the private version.

Here are a couple lists of government programs that a lot of people consider to be successful. These are just a few examples.  And, they are not my lists.  I copied these and the extra comments are not mine either.

Medicare
Social Security
Head Start
Americorps–for every $1 spent, we get benefits from $1.60-$2.60
CDC
Direct Student Loans
FMLA
Mine Safety & Health Administration
National Weather Service
Peace Corps
National Biological Service
Food Labeling
National Consumer Product Safety Commission
Clean Water Act
WIC — we save $2-$4 on Medicaid for every dollar spent on WIC
Civil Rights Act (which conservatives fought tooth and nail against and changed the segregationist south into a Republican bastion.)
GI Bill
TVA
The Internet (ironically infested by geeky libertarian losers)
FDIC
NASA
Brown vs. Board of Education (since emasculated by the Rehnquist court)

A second list…

Army
Navy / Marines
Air Force
Coast Guard
National Guard
EPA
NIH
Nat’l Bureau of Standards
NSF
NOAA
FBI
CIA (mostly…)
Fisheries
Border Patrol
NASA

Remember… It’s not that the agencies are perfect. NO ORGANIZATION IS PERFECT. It’s that they are broadly/mostly successful in fulfilling their charters. Not perfect. Just mostly successful.

It’s also helpful to consider both sides of the argument. Medicare, for instance, is VERY popular among seniors. If you told a senior citizen that you were going to take away their Medicare, they would cap you at your knees with their cane. If you tell a hospital they have to accept Medicare reimbursement rates, they do it. Begrudgingly. But, they accept it. So, it can’t be as horrible as the alternative of taking the program away from the people who need it.

Here’s another little history lesson that you might not be aware of. Before Social Security passed, there were a lot of poor old folks. I mean, old people who were living in poverty, had little to no family left, and were being forced out onto the streets to beg because they had no other place to go. People who had contributed to society for decades are were now too old to be able to work. Social Security was and still is considered a massive success story because it fixed the problem it was intended to resolve. Should it be reformed? Sure. Lots of people who don’t need Social Security checks get them. But, the program itself has been a wild success.

[This was in reply to a personal email, which is private and not included in this post]

So, what’s the broader point? We need to take the money out of politics. The recent Supreme Court decision to allow "corporate personhood" to be used as a convenient argument for corporate "free speech" is nothing less than legalized bribery. Money is not speech. This is corruption at its finest.

America took a huge step forward away from this kind of chicanery in November of 2008 when we overwhelmingly elected Barack Obama as President. But, the balance of power has far from shifted. The Supreme Court is still very conservative. Lobbyists still run Capitol Hill. The wealthiest 1% of Americans own a larger percentage of our national wealth than they did during the Great Depression. Yet, the income taxes on people making over $250,000 a year are at an all time low. The people with all the money have all the power, and they are using that power to get more money and power. If we allow this to continue, the system will collapse — just like it did 80 years ago.

We need your voice. We need grassroots organizing more than ever before.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/19/838689/-The-Bush-400

The bottom 90% (900,000/10,000ths) earns 50%. This is even lower than it was during the Great Depression.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-february-8-2010-jenny-sanford

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264042/february-08-2010/sarah-palin-uses-a-hand-o-prompter

And, while you’re at it, this is an awesome clip on health care reform:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-february-11-2010/the-apparent-trap