Street Theater Politics

In his post here yesterday, Martin Zehr wrote the following:

Street theatre has become all too often a justification for avoiding electoral politics. Slogans too often replace sound policies.

I could not avoid commenting that this was so true.

Yesterday evening, I was watching Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC. His Last Word segment regarding the ongoing protest on and against Wall Street is a good example. He was interviewing a master of street theater, Michael Moore and they both managed to get the story wrong.

It is truly good theater and I support the idea that we need to call Wall Street to account. If they had stopped at the first segment with MM, I might have agreed. However, they didn't and ended up trying to solve the problem of income income equality. There they made the same mistake that the Obama administration has done, expecting that a magical application of growth will be the elixir that gets us out of trouble. Growth is what will give hope to the masses. Unfortunately, such growth is no longer a rational prescription for what ails this country.

Even more ironically in-appropriate to the situation is the fact that you had to watch a commercial from Exxon-Mobil (2X) before getting to see the segment through to the end.

Growth is going to be forever limited by resource constraints. The first area of concern in to be found in the energy / water / climate change nexus. These three areas will be tightly linked, if not forever, at least for the lifespan of the next generation. Energy will be increasingly expensive. Fresh water will arrive in floods where we don't need more or not at all where we do need it. The extraction of new energy, especially from sources like fracking the Marcellus Shale or tapping Canada's Alberta Tar Sands, is going to take more and more fresh water leaving it unusable for anything else, contaminated and too expensive to clean up. And when we get done, all we will have done is exacerbate the problem of global warming, pushing the cycle even further beyond tolerable.

If Michael Moore, given his taking over the media regarding the Occupy Wall Street event, can not make this point, then Greens damn well need to be the one to tell these truths:

• that the world has changed so much we can not longer grow our way out of trouble,
• that we must not purchase buy economic ease by condemning our children to live in a sweat-box, 
• that corporations are not citizens,

Lawrence, rather than give MM yet another soap box for his feel good populism, try once to put a real Green in front of your camera: Howie Hawkins, D.r Jill Stein, Dr. Kent Mesplay. Or would that offend your Wall Street Corporate Sponsors.

For another view of Occupy Wall Street, read that of Green John Halle here:

Today’s NYT’s coverage of the protestors, predictably contemptuous and dismissive, sets the stage perfectly for this crackdown-and provides grounds for all the right thinking people who are the Times’ primary demographic to avert their eyes.  The few decent people who find out about this may get on the subway and head to Wall Street to bear witness, and maybe even act.

But I can’t say I’m in the least optimistic that anything like this is in the cards-certainly nothing approximating the display of force which we must marshall  to make a difference.

Sustainable Growth is No Longer Feasible

This the latest in my columns from the Morgan Hill Times.

Last week's Times showed us two reasons that we need to be concerned about growth. One was the Times editorial focusing on the fact that there are so many housing allotments that have been awarded, but not built. The other was the fact that the Morgan Hill Unified School District is losing rather than gaining students. The combination illustrates two of the pitfalls in planning for growth.

Like any community, Morgan Hill would love to be able to digest population growth like a leisurely dinner with friends, filling allotted slots each year. We are told that builders are not using their allocations for economic reasons, that they can not afford to build homes when credit is not available or the foreclosures have made the current stock of housing more affordable.

Even if the rate of housing growth were constant, it still does not guarantee schools will be able to plan accordingly. There are, again, more options for families. Some will send their children to private schools. Other families will choose not to have as many children, a seemingly wise choice when the economy is no longer predictable.

Our president hardly opens his mouth without mentioning the need to grow jobs. In that, his detractors, both Republican and Democratic, seem to agree. But the supply of jobs is not growing in the US. Even in California where one would expect innovation to create new jobs faster than we can fill the old ones, unemployment remains higher than 10 percent and in neighboring San Benito County, it is higher than 20 percent.

Maybe it is time to stop and ask ourselves whether the historical rates of growth are really possible. Increasingly, we are seeing events that fall outside the expected range if one's only reference is the historical record. Considering climate, the current drought and heat dome that has engulfed Texas is unprecedented and nearly unbearable. The analysis provided by the Texas State Climatologist shows that the 2011 drought is clearly outside the range of normal event. It may be enough to change the way that people think about living in Texas, about the quality of life there, and that will surely affect growth and the finances of local government.

For growth to continue, we need to be able to provide physical material to support it. But since the Earth is a finite source of everything, it may not always be possible. The list of things currently, or soon to be, in short supply seems to get longer every day. Lithium for new batteries is limited currently to just two major mining sources. The rare earth materials used in our increasingly innovative electronics are currently 80 percent sourced from China and the only other known major source requires deep seabed mining technology to be developed.

Californians know that fresh water is in limited supply. And for energy, we have to consider that the supplies of both oil and coal have peaked while a recent analysis of well head data shows that the supplies of natural gas that have been so abundantly advertised have also been overestimated by 100 percent. Some have even made the case that we have already passed the peak of uranium production with a corresponding increase in the costs of nuclear power.

Any one of these limits could have a major negative effect on our economy. In particular, the costs of energy production are increasing. We have gotten to all of the easy oil, coal and natural gas while we seem unable to fully endorse the replacement from renewable sources. Taken together, these physical world realities also place limits on economic growth, if not now, then in the not to distant future. There is a special term for investments that can only return value by securing new investments. It is called a Ponzi Scheme. The same term could be applied to the idea that we can sustain perpetual economic growth.

It no longer makes sense for any political entity to base fiscal policies on the assumption that current spending can be paid for by future growth. We can see what this has done for the national economy and we are paying for the cost by shedding jobs and a Congressional Circus to distract us from reality. We can see what this has done for the State of California where we take the money from education. The problem we have to solve locally is how to provide for a slowly growing population with declining resources. It will require resetting our priorities and developing a new vision of what Morgan Hill needs to be.

What is growth good for?

I have another Green Talk column online at my local newspaper, the Morgan Hill Times. I really believe that we must challenge the idea that Growth is Good. It is almost the Gordon Gekko line from Wall Street, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".

Not only do we have a better word, we have a better way. Green, for lack of a better alternative, is good. Read the full column here.

A Center - Right government?

In all of the excitement over the election of Barack Obama, with California focused on Proposition 8, the media never mentioned that there was another country that had an election on Nov. 4... New Zealand. I mention this because there were several things we should take notice of. Click Read more! and I will go through it.


The previous government in New Zealand was the Labor party. They had a minority government and worked with the aid of 6 Greens. In the most recent election, the Labor government was handed it's walking papers, but Greens added 2 seats.

The winner was the National Party, described as being "Center Left." According to the New Zealand Herald the incoming Prime Minister, John Key said "Hopefully just a change of government will give some confidence to the economy, that we are going to put economic growth at the top of the agenda."

Is this a characteristic of a Center Right government? to put economic growth at the top of the agenda? Isn't that what Obama said he would do in his first news conference as President elect? "I will confront this economic crisis head-on by taking all necessary steps to ease the credit crisis, help hardworking families, and restore growth and prosperity."

It sounds to me that New Zealand changed a leftist government for one whose policies are Center-Right. And in America, we bounced a far right Republican Party for a Center-Right Democrat. The really sound the same.

I think that a many members of the PDA are going to become frustrated. We need to welcome them with open arms.