Stop Me Before I Vote Again

There's a proposal to build a windmill farm for electric power generation in Nantucket Sound -- a measure so obviously intelligent and environmentally sound that even the Green Party can't help supporting it.

Unfortunately, Nantucket Sound is a body of water almost entirely sourrounded by millionaires. Needless to say, these folks don't want their view of their neighbors' giant fume-spewing power yachts -- all that blue smoke, so pretty -- impaired by windmills. There is a fundamental leisure-class theorem which holds that anything utilitarian, however benign, must never be obtruded on a millionaire's notice; the aesthetic, by definition, must be pure consumption, and if it consumes large amounts of land or oil and generates abundant pollution, well, so much the better.

Among these wealthy Nantucket Sound consumer-aestheticians are the Kennedy family, and in particular, Uncle Ted and his somewhat rodentine nephew Robert Kennedy Jr. -- yes, the late McCarthy Bob's son. Bobby Jr. is a macher with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent enviro group.

The Kennedys have been fighting this windmill project tooth and nail. Here's the latest:

A provision written specifically to stop the proposed Cape Wind project slated for offshore Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts was tucked into a bill that was voted out of committee on Thursday, April 6. No hearings had been held on the provision. The bill containing the provision still must be approved by the full House and Senate, which will be on spring recess over the next two weeks.

The action came when members of a House-Senate conference committee approved a final compromise version of an $8.7 billion Coast Guard authorization bill containing language allowing the Governor of Massachusetts the unrestricted power to veto the project. Current Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R) is on the record opposing the Cape Wind project.

Leading the effort to stop the Cape Wind project by adding the veto provision to the bill were Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens (R) and Alaska Rep. Don Young (R), senior Congressional negotiators on the bill. In addition, "Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) spoke to Sen. Stevens in support of this provision," said Kennedy spokesperson Melissa Wagoner, who was quoted in an April 7 story by the Associated Press.

Among the wind farm's opponents are wealthy Cape Cod homeowners, including Mass. Sen. Ted Kennedy, his nephew Robert Kennedy, Jr., and the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, whose first president was CEO of Phelps-Dodge, a mining corporation that placed first on the EPA list of toxic emitters in Arizona and New Mexico. Other opponents include Senators John Warner and Lamar Alexander, whose families also own waterfront property on the Cape.

There's some pretty wonderful other black-hats in there with the Kennedy boyz. Greenpeace ran down some 411 on a few of these:

A few weeks after the Cape Wind proposal was announced in 2001, Wayne Kurker, the owner of Hyannis Marina, started the [anti-windmill] Alliance. The stated purpose of the Alliance was, and is, to stop Cape Wind and to prevent wind turbines from being located in Nantucket Sound. Mr. Kurker has been on the receiving end of criticism from members of the community over the years about his marina expansion plans and over his marina buildings giving the Hyannis Inner Harbor an industrial look. Months after forming the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Mr. Kurker was advocating for high-speed cigarette boat racing to occur in Nantucket Sound.

As the Alliance grew in 2002 from an active fundraising campaign, it obtained an office, hired several full-time staff and announced the selection of a CEO, Douglas Yearley. Mr. Yearley had retired to a large home overlooking Nantucket Sound after a long career at Phelps Dodge, an international copper and uranium mining company that under his watch as CEO was rated as the biggest polluter in Arizona by the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Yearley's tenure at Phelps Dodge was also recognized by Mother Jones Magazine (http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/1995/07/piggies.html ) in their 1995 article, “10 Little Piggies. Forget welfare moms and the unemployed. No one feeds at the public trough like these ten.”

In 2005 the Cape Cod Times (http://www.capecodonline.com/special/windfarm/kochitxs7.htm) reported that the Alliance had selected Bill Koch as their new Co-Chairman, a part-time Cape resident who owns a multi-million dollar property in Osterville overlooking Nantucket Sound.... A billionaire who made much of his fortune in the coal and oil industries, Mr. Koch spoke about Cape Wind in a recent interview, ''So what? I'm interested in my view and the value of my property on the Cape,'' he said.... ''I freely admit I don't want to look at (the turbines).''

Although Mr. Koch began his energy business in Massachusetts, he moved his company to Florida for tax reasons. As reported in a St. Petersburg 2003 article entitled, “Big boys profit on mom-and-pops tax break, Many of Florida's largest private companies use tax exemptions created for small businesses, bypassing any corporate income tax”.

It seems Mr. Koch doesn't seem to object to energy projects in somebody else's back yard (http://www.sptimes.com/2003/12/28/State/Big_boys_profit_on_mo.shtml).

Greenpeace has produced a TV ad revealing Sen. Ted Kennedy as the enviro-hypocrite he is. Despite repeating in a recent interview that he is all for renewable energy development, Kennedy continues to oppose the Cape Wind project, which would be the first offshore wind farm in the country. Sen. Stevens of Alaska said it was at the request of Kennedy that he insert the sneaky amendment to the Coast Guard bill that would effectively kill Cape Wind.

With the vote coming any day, Greenpeace will run the ad in a few states as part of an effort to push key Senators to remove the dirty Cape Wind amendment. After countless pledges and a new energy bill, it's time Congress walks the walk on renewable energy.

Al Gore must think so behold his Greening of America plan.

Hey, I'm no mean green dancing extreme, but if I was a pragmatic vote-seeking vacuum like big Al, I might figure this is one popular crusade the trans-nats might get on board.

A dove to empire?
Nope.

Single payer medical?
Nope.

Class warrior?
Double nope.

Deficit daddy?
Nope.

Mistah green bloomer?
Yeah, baby, yeah!

Environmentalists, Though Winners in the Election, Warn Against Expecting Vast Changes
By FELICITY BARRINGER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — Last week’s election whipsawed the Congressional committees that are crucial battlegrounds for environmental and energy legislation. But even many environmentalists believe that an ambitious new agenda is unlikely....

“I think you’d have to go back to the Enlightenment to find such a big change in worldviews,” Ken Cook, the president of the Environmental Working Group, a research organization, told reporters on Monday.

But despite the committee changes, some lobbyists are trying to dampen expectations that a major environmental agenda can speed through Congress.

...[T]hey say that trying to get the new Congress to embrace initiatives like tougher automobile fuel-economy standards and requirements that industry pay more for Superfund cleanups could mean that little, if anything, will be accomplished.

Melinda Pierce, a senior lobbyist with the Sierra Club, said in an interview, “The environmental community has to recognize how difficult it’s going to be to advance an environmental agenda with such narrowly held majorities.”

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and the presumptive new chairman of the Energy Committee, said in an interview: “I think there’s a danger of trying to overreach. The close divide between Democrats and Republicans ensures we can’t pass anything unless we get some Republican support.”

...The views held by Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, show the difficulty in finding support for a broad agenda. Mr. Dingell supports the control and cleanup of toxic substances but has never embraced automobile fuel-efficiency standards.

Nevertheless, this is the biggest event since "the Enlightenment." A perfect illustration of dissociated Democratic thinking: voting for Democrats is supremely important, but don't expect anything of them once they're elected.

Just read a piece over at Counterpunch on the state of the non-profit social-change subsector of our American class struggle.

Point of attack? Bad-spirited nonprofit orgs -- the spotlight-hogging, power-grabbing, unscrupulous grant-hound outfits.

The Counterpunch writer, Chris Irwin, calls them "someprofits" and he develops a nice Jeremiah-like head of steam describing their iniquities:

They are the ones always 5 years late on the true populist grassroots campaigns. Someprofits become so oriented in following the campaigns that are being funded they miss the ones that will be and always come to campaigns late in the game to start a non stop campaign to seize control of what they do not understand.

Someprofits come into campaigns late in the game and then drift towards centralizing control. They call them “steering committess” where they form “coalitions” that always seems to boil down to fewer people making decisions.

Someprofits think that since they are getting paid to organize—that they must be professionals and really good at it. This expert head cripples in that the very nature of conflict is that no two are the same. It also makes them arrogant and gives them a sense of entitlement when they seize, and then drive right deep into the dirt—the campaigns.

After all this, the enraged Irwin suggests how a real progressive non-profit outfit oughta be missioning itself: not "to fund themselves -- but to provide resources and tools for the betterment of our world." Now you can't find much in that to quibble over.

Irwin kinda stumbles at the finish line, unfortunately. Those that know need to name names -- which Irwin doesn't do. (I bet he's got the Sierra Club in mind, though.) The dark side orgs need to be outed and vilified by name. There's no room for love-thine-enemy cure-the-patient shit in this scrap. And his peroration is downright social-workerish:

If a someprofit was an adult you would confront them with their behavior and offer clear consequences if they do not modify their antisocial behavior.... we as a community need to confront these someprofits with their behavior because how many of them are acting is damaging, inappropriate and just plain bad manners.

Still...

Posts along these lines are comparatively rare in the larger left indy media, so I salute it despite the fizzle factor.

Cap-and-trade is a nice model for price mechanisms driven by social policy.

Unlike a tax, which slaps on a price increase, a cap and trade arrives at the price increase -- but that's ahhh theory -- then there's the details.

Here's Matt Yglesias, snub-gun journalist, on carbon emission markets:

"Capping the amount of allowable carbon dioxide emissions creates a new source of wealth in the economy — permission to emit carbon dioxide.

This, in turn, raises a question about how to allocate that resource. One suggestion, popular with industry and its tame dogs in congress, is to allocate it to industry. Give the permits away, and let companies either use them themselves or sell them to others.

Another suggestion, more popular with environmentalists and economists, is to auction the permits and then use the funds thereby raised to accomplish something useful....

They have the same macroeconomic impact, and presumably the same ecological impact. But the cap-and-rebate proposal results in gains for the bottom 40 percent of households, a tiny loss for the median quintile, and small losses for the top 40 percent.

The cap-and-giveaway proposal results in large losses for the bottom 80 percent of the population and a large gain for the top 20 percent.

Pinkos better get up to speed on this region of applied public economics, and start calling the balls and strikes accurately. Just unleashing the dogmas of class war to bark, bay, and howl benightedly at the rising of the congressional harvest moon is no good. Much more comes from understanding this shit from the inside out than screaming for the ultimo option that isn't an option.

Yes, in theory there is a Pigou tax that can do anything cap and trade can do -- like the carbon tax advocated by Father Smiff's pal Charles Komanoff.

And yes, single payer is a final solution devoutly to be sought.

But but but -- and the irony here gives me a tingle -- all you decentralizin' Eric Blair types get a wedgy over -- THE STATE.

To Josephine Average Wage Schmuckette, nothing, nothing more accurately operates as the lightning bolt of the state than a tax slap or a mandate. On this green stuff, and health stuff both, a few shrewd market mechanism designs (as in cap and trade on carbon emissions, and a fightin' pub op in the health sector) is a path to decentralization and lower-archy.

Interested? If so, here's a nice Ivy League site for your reading pleasure.

Or maybe it should be "Larval Mothra Attacks" -- that's him over on the right, I believe.

Comrade Owen has recently been taking, if I understand him, a devil's advocate position: first about public-option health care (as opposed to single-payer), and most recently about cap-and-trade for CO₂ emissions.

Owen allows as how these approaches are not be as desirable as single-payer and (maybe) a carbon tax respectively, but maybe there's something to be said for 'em. Here he is on the subject of single-payer vs. public-option:

One big slice, straight through the neck -- Conyers' uncle payer plan (HR 676); or the slow bleed to death -- Stark's free-to-choose Medicare bill?

.... Is there a serious difference here? I doubt there is, in the long run -- given a choice, a la Stark, the citizenry will gradually opt for uncle's medicare system, obviously.

So why, besides the art of the impossibly superior, prefer Conyers' plan?

Yes, in theory there is a Pigou tax that can do anything cap and trade can do -- like the carbon tax advocated by Father Smiff's pal Charles Komanoff.

And yes, single payer is a final solution devoutly to be sought.

But [o]n this green stuff, and health stuff both, a few shrewd market mechanism designs (as in cap and trade on carbon emissions, and a fightin' pub op in the health sector) is a path to decentralization and lower-archy.

Owen knows a good deal more than I do about this sort of thing, and even if I thought he was wrong, I'd be hard-pressed to argue the point. But the problem doesn't arise: as a technical matter I don't doubt that he is right. A "fighting" public-option -- and a "shrewd" cap and trade program -- would no doubt be better than what we have now, at the very least, and might lead to systemic change further on (though the certainty of that seems less clear).

The qualifications -- "fighting" and "shrewd" -- are quite important, however.

It's pretty clear that single-payer isn't on the table; and if a carbon tax hasn't been ruled out, it's only because nobody who matters has ever considered it. And why? Because -- of course -- corporate America doesn't want either of these things, and corporate America -- unlike the enviro wonkery and the academic wonkery -- deploys the big battalions.

But what reason is there to believe, then, that they would stand for a "fighting" public option, or a "shrewd" cap and trade, either? What reason is there to think that we won't get Hillary Rediviva, with no-fight Romneycare sauce, by way of health care reform; and by way of emissions reduction, yet another flood of new kinds of securities to trade -- with shrewdness to be seen only in the parasites and cormorants who will make their living swapping these grubby bits of paper, made into valuable property by Uncle's fiat?

So I wonder why -- apart from professional pride -- Owen is spending his time fighting this corner.

He writes:

Pinkos better get up to speed on this region of applied public economics, and start calling the balls and strikes accurately. Just unleashing the dogmas of class war to bark, bay, and howl benightedly at the rising of the congressional harvest moon is no good.

But folks like us have very little influence on events. This fact has some implications. Since we don't have to be "responsible" -- responsible, that is for the misery that the responsables in Washington are certainly going to cause -- we also don't have to be realistic. In fact, it would be a ridiculous affectation for us to be realistic. Who, after all, do we think we are? Congressional aides? What on earth is the downside for us to be maximalists, incorrigibles, millennarians? Is anything we do going to forfeit the good in favor of the unattainable best?

Still, I share Owen's pain, or some of it, anyway. Too much Left scenography introduces a tired old cast of pasteboard personifications onto the stage -- the Bourgeoisie, the Working Class, the Sellout Politicians and their pets, the Running Dogs. If Owen's goal is to sketch in some more detail and bring a breath of life to this stale discourse, then one can only applaud.