Category Archives: Politics

Calling out the Canadian environmentalists

Posted on by
1

Robert Silver and Tim Powers have a blog that has been running on the Globe & Mail’s website during the Canadian federal election. Each one of them is a stout partisan: Silver a Liberal, and Powers a Conservative. I’d love to be able to call what is happening on the blog a “debate,” but for a debate to occur, both parties need to be able to come to some basic agreement on the topic at hand. For the most part, this hasn’t happened on the Silver-Powers blog, so the conversation has been dominated by a lot of sniping at one another. 

Yesterday, however, Silver posted one of the most provocative and interesting articles I’ve read by anyone this election cycle. He correctly points out that Stephane Dion’s major policy proposal this election, the Green Shift, is exactly the sort of thing that environmentalists have been demanding for the last 25 years. Finally, we have an election in which serious environmental policy should be the centre of discussion, and yet Canadian environmentalists have dropped the ball in terms of speaking up about the policy. 

Silver writes:

So today the enviros have the election they have been waiting for, they have the platform they have been lobbying for and they have a leader who believes in it to his core.

And yet, from the enviros, silence. It hurts ones ears to listen to the silence that has emanated from the environmental groups since the Green Shift was released, never mind during this campaign.

Oh sure, we heard yesterday – for the first time this campaign – from one who told us “it’s time for a serious debate.” Time for a debate? Well isn’t that nice. I love a good debate…where, when, what’s the resolution and more importantly what the hell are you thinking?

Without writing a treatise on lobbying, let me put it fairly bluntly: When you spend 25 years lobbying for something, a political party offers it up to you – not in part, in full – and you just don’t show up, you are screwed.

If, when you do decide to show up, about three months late to the party, you say it’s to start a “debate” and say there are lots of options available – as if there are three equal sides and a healthy exchange of ideas will work it all out – what do you think happens the next time you ask something of a political party?

You are ignored, is the answer. You are irrelevant. You have shown that you are toothless, all bark no bite – insert your hackneyed expression here but they all add up to irrelevance. Or worse, you are the new wedge that your opponents know they can set opposing political parties up on.

Full disclosure: Silver is an old friend of mine, and though we do not share the same politics, I think that a Pigovian tax scheme such as the Green Shift is an absolute no-brainer. It is exactly the type of fundamental shift that is needed to really address the costs that unchecked carbon emissions place on society as a whole. Nearly every serious environmentalist and economist I have read testify to the wisdom and necessity of a carbon tax.  

Canadian environmentalists, where are you? Are you going to let Stephen Harper’s obfuscations win the day? I respect Jack Layton immensely. He’s my local MP, but I think he’s spouting pure populism on the issue of carbon taxes because it looks like an easy way to win votes. I understand his motives, but I hope that if by some miracle, the NDP and Liberals win enough seats to hold power in a minority government, that they’ll be able to come together on a sensible carbon tax.

Obama meets Bartlet

Posted on by
Reply

Josiah Bartlet

I love Aaron Sorkin. I’m a sucker for everything he does. My friends and I quote from The American President freely and at length. I think The West Wing is the greatest television show that’s ever been a television show. Hell, I just bought Studio 60 on DVD.

So, imagine my delight when I learned that Maureen Dowd asked Sorkin to write up a hypothetical meeting between Barack Obama and Jed Bartlet.

This is how it starts:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

Visit Dowd’s page at the New York Times for the rest. It’s well worth the read. (Thanks for the email on this, Shuman!)

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

John McCain Approved This Message

Posted on by
Reply

How surprising is it that John McCain, war hero, maverick, man of principle, is taking the low road in this election? Not surprising at all. He has no other choice. This is from Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and author of The Political Brain.

With all that stacked against him, the only road that could take McCain to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the low road, one of the few pieces of infrastructure left in good repair by President Bush. His father paved it against Michael Dukakis, George W. Bush repaved it running against John Kerry, and the GOP repainted the dotted line in now-Senator Bob Corker’s 2006 contest with Harold Ford. The path to success for McCain is to make the election a referendum on his opponent, by working in silent concert with 527 groups and media outlets such as Fox News to pursue character assassination, guilt by association, and, most of all, the effort to paint Obama as different, foreign, unlike “us,” and dangerous (and did I mention that he’s black?).

That’s from a piece Dr. Westen published in The New Republic over two months ago, but it stuck with me ever since. Westen also maintains a semi-regular blog at the Huffington Post.

It saddens me that McCain has been reduced to taking the low road. The only thing sadder will be if it works.

I, for one, Welcome our Big Government Overlords

Posted on by
Reply

Every election cycle, men and women who have dedicated their lives to government come before the electors and decry at length the failures of government. They promise to reduce its size and its reach. They realize, they say, that government does not have all the answers to their problems, so they promise “less government” and “lower taxes.” These are no longer solely shibboleths of the right; they are the most mainstream of ideas.

The appeal of Ron Paul, particularly among the young, technocratic elite, demonstrates just how attractive these ideas are, even in their most extreme form. Paul would dismantle the EPA, the FDA and the Federal Reserve, just for a start. For, in the minds of Libertarian extremists, there is nothing that government provides that could not be better handled by the all-knowing, all-powerful free market. This is an article of faith with these people. They are the Christian Scientists of economics. “Forget about trying to solve your problems,” they say, “just put your life into the hands of the free market and everything will be just fine. Its will be done.”

Today, in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe, Jeff Madrick mounts a vigorous defence of big government and provides an indictment of the accepted wisdom that low taxes lead to economic growth. Madrick points to the work of mainstream economist Peter Lindert, quoting from his 2004 book, Growing Public: ”It is well-known that higher taxes and transfers reduce productivity. Well-known – but unsupported by statistics and history.”

According to Madrick:

Lindert’s work surveyed a century of data across numerous countries and found that high taxes and social spending did not slow the growth of productivity or GDP. Statistically speaking, Lindert found no relationship between the level of social spending and economic growth. High tax nations like Norway grow rapidly and produce high standards of living. Even the income per hour of work in nations like France and Germany is equal to or even exceeds America’s.

We’ve become so cynical about the government, so embittered by our interactions with less-than-competent public officials, so disenchanted by sex scandals and broken promises, that we forget that public services, despite all their failings, power the economy, regulate its abuses, and increase the standard of living for all us.

From building the railroads and the highway system, to developing our universal educational infrastructure, right up to the government research and leadership that gave us the Internet (thanks, Al Gore – no, really!), government programs and social spending are often the engine that drives progress.

Madrick, whose latest book, The Case for Big Government, will be released in November, sums up like this:

There is no rich nation in the world today, including America, that has grown wealthy without significant government involvement. And there will be no rich nation in the future that can stay wealthy without robust government, either.

It’s obvious that government can’t solve all of our problems, but neither can the market. It is only a healthy balance of both that is capable of making the kind of future that we want. Now all we need is a government that we can believe in for a change.

Republican P.O.W.

Posted on by
Reply

“John McCain became a P.O.W. this week, at the hands of his own Party. It was Sarah Palin’s Convention, not McCain’s. His speech last night was so out of sync with the vituperative tone and stale, hard-right cultural populism of the Convention’s other headliners—above all, Palin—that he sounded less like a Presidential nominee than one of those token speakers given a spot on the program just to prove that the Party welcomes diversity. ”

That’s from George Packer’s blog, available online only at the New Yorker.

Using the P.O.W. myth against McCain has never been done as effectively, I believe, as Packer does in this short piece. He continues:

This time, though, McCain is collaborating with his captors. By picking Palin he knowingly guided his campaign well over hostile territory and then aimed its nose straight down. Once taken hostage, he refused to speak his captors’ propaganda, but he allowed everyone else to shout it to the rafters.

As I was watching McCain give his speech, I mostly kept thinking to myself “I can’t stand the rest of these Republicans, but I have a soft spot for McCain. They’ve managed to nominate the only candidate who’s life history and personal story has a conceivable chance of standing up against Barack Obama’s.” Yet, I couldn’t help thinking, at the same time: He’s the nominee now. He’s the head of his party. He should be able to dictate the tone of the debate, but he’s been completely unable to do that.

No one would hold against him the fact that he broke, as he said last night, under North Vietnamese torture. His capitulation to the latest group of hard-liners to take him prisoner is a lot harder to justify.

I’ll always have a soft spot for John McCain. I think he’s a guy who really has tried to do the “right” thing over the long course of his career. It’s unfortunate that the end point of that career has him a prisoner of the hard-right Republican base, instead of finally being able to rise above it.