Good News, Bad News for a Progressive U.S. Energy Policy
Unfortunately, we live in a time when our “leaders” simply tell us what they think we want to hear. Anytime, and especially in an election year, a U.S. presidential candidate stands up for an idea, it means that he believes that a majority of voters will stand behind him. Based on the events of the past few days, that implies both good news and bad news.
The good news is that, apparently, the Obama people believe that a majority favors a constitutional amendment overturning the U.S. Supreme Court decision “Citizens United,” which currently provides corporations the right to spend as much money as they choose to influence our elections. The fossil fuel companies, for example, can essentially guarantee that Congress will continue to be composed of people whose thinking — and legislation — favors their interests. If you’re wondering why your government is still writing big checks to subsidize the oil companies, you really needn’t look much further.
But this may change. On Wednesday of last week, the president wrote:
“Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight on the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”
Why “over the longer term?” Since it’s a good idea, wouldn’t it be good to do it now?
In any case, the bad news is that the Romney campaign evidentally believes that a majority approves of his ridiculing the concepts of climate science, droughts, rising sea levels, and global warming. For those who may have missed this revolting moment in the closing moments of the Republican National Convention, here it is. This points to a sickening new low in terms of both the level of sophistication and the level of sensitivity of the American voter. I can only hope his people have made a terrible miscalculation.
Craig, I just want to make sure I have this right: The American left wants to ban American corporations from contributing American money to American political campaigns, because they are afraid that such large contributions might influence the outcome of those elections, while the very same American left wants to eliminate any effort by states to ensure that only legal, registered voters can actually vote in those same elections, which would, presumably, allow large numbers of illegal aliens to vote in our elections. Do I have that right? Now, as an aside, “corporate influence” in elections has had very little, if any, impact on the results thereof, or we wouldn’t have had Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the White House. Of course, elections are won by VOTES and ONLY VOTES, not by money. As a conservative, I believe passionately in “one man; one vote,” but it seems some others don’t. Perhaps employees of “corporations” shouldn’t be allowed to vote at all; maybe, in the leftist view, “the poor” should be credited with five or ten votes each, while “the rich” would be stopped at the polling place door.
I’m just sayin’…
Duke,
I’m an independent voter, and voting is extremely important to me. Since I attained voting age, I’ve voted for every GOP candidate that ever took the office of President (with the proud exception of George W. Bush).
I’ve looked into these accusations of in-person voter fraud – the kind where people show up at American polling places and cast votes when they have no legal right to do so. I discovered that in-person voter fraud is practically non-existent in our country. These alarmist fables are merely a thin pretext to excuse rewarmed Jim Crow laws that suppress lawful voting – laws that American courts are already finding invalid under the equal protection clause of our Constitution.
The strident whining of American extremists on this issue glaringly contradicts the facts, and it’s particularly incongruous when these extremists raise no objection to the far more hazardous and fraud-prone American e-voting systems that leave no paper trail.
If you truly love our country, you’ll take a hard look at your talk-radio assumptions, and educate yourself on these issues using hard information from independent sources.
As an aside, the old habit of splitting Americans into “right” and “left” is rapidly losing both accuracy and usefulness, and you should rethink your adherence to it. The more truthful and important distinction is between the populist and corporatist camps that underlay the veneer of red and blue. The grassroots elements of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are examples of the populist end of the spectrum, and the “establishment” Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats are in the corporatist camp.
In one example of this change, congressional Republicans widely cheered the “Citizens United” vs. FEC decision… until it became obvious to them how many among their base detested it as woefully unconstitutional judicial activism. Then, the GOP leadership simply shut up and let the decision quietly stand.
Back in the days of Carter, corporate campaign money was much more limited in volume and was split far more evenly between red and blue, and unions were much more influential than they are today – union membership having been beaten down from about 30% of the workforce back then, to about 10% today. If you do a little review of history, you’ll notice that the flood of money began after SCOTUS opened the corporate spigots.
A wide majority of Americans across the political spectrum are aware and disapprove of the heavily documented corrupting influence of money – flowing from FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC corporations – into American government (against which the financial influence of American unions – American workers – has long been a pale sliver).
It’s a perilous fiction that the use of money (for that corrupting bribery we know as “campaign contributions” and “lobbying”) should be regarded as Freedom of Speech. This fiction allows the wealthy – foreign and domestic – to scream into media bullhorns, and select and pocket our leadership, while the rest of us whisper and plead for justice.
There are a few exceptions but, in the main, we have sock-puppet politicians – red and blue – who are thoroughly bought long before their even elected, and they merely masquerade as public servants. Our present economy and government are the predictable outcomes of this farce.
If you “believe passionately in ‘one man; one vote'” (and I’ll presume that you include women in that equation), then the present phenomenon of ‘one dollar, one vote’ should make you as apprehensive about the future of our republic as it does every true patriot.
Cameron
Only legally registered voters can cast ballots now. You cannot register without proof of citizenship. Either they mail the stuff to you, and you must sign it and mail it back (as in Oregon), or you go to the polls, show your registration card, they find your name in the list, and you sign your name the same as you signed it when you registered. There were only seven cases of voter impersonation nationwide in 2004. There can be only one vote cast per registered name, anyway, so the value of voter impersonation in rigging an election is near zero regardless. The frauds we know of require corrupt poll workers to find out who is dead and still registered and round up impersonators to forge the dead voters’ signatures, or just to stuff ballot boxes with ballots that no voter ever saw. When the pollworkers are stuffing ballot boxes, as has been done in the past in Chicago and Texas, photo ID requirements are not going to stop them. The place to prove you are legally entitled to vote is at voter registration, not at the polling place. Photo ID requirements impact those Americans who have none, there being no requirement for such a thing to exist at all under the Constitution, and a requirement for it may actually be prohibited under the Constitution. None of the statutory IDs required by these laws is universally held, and obstacles to voting are, of themselves, illegal in many States. You really should do your social studies homework before you express such a baseless, invalid opinion.
Duke,
First: You need to become more politically correct, undocumented worker not illegal aliens.
Second: Do you honestly believe an undocumented worker is in the U.S. to risk deportation to vote? The undocumented worker is in the U.S. for one reason, work.
Third: The right did the same thing 100 years ago with women and 50 year ago in the South.
Soooo, Duke. You obviously do NOT have it right. Try elsewhere.
Corporate influence has little to do with elections outcome or we would not have had Carter clinton or Obama? What? Corporate interest owns Congress and the votes there in or we would not be in this hell hole. Are you denying hundreds of millions of Lobby money has done anything?
We have the best Congress money can buy, if you are not real enough to admit that you are a real sad example ….
Greg Chick
Craig,
The reason that the amendment must be a long-term proposition is because amending the Constitution of the United States is an extremely difficult undertaking, which takes time. Even under the best possible circumstances it’s hard to imagine a newly proposed amendment becoming law within 2-4 years… It will just take longer than that to line up all the state legislatures to vote on it, even if you get assurance that 38 states legislatures would vote “yes” (currently that is unlikely, the republicans control 30 state legislatures).
Also, congrats on getting a teabagger troll. You should take that as a sign that you are starting to be noticed by a few people outside the pro-renewables core.
Mayor Daily had it right when he said, “Never have an election untill after you have counted the votes.”
As for getting people to the poles, Eliminate the Poles entirely as Oregon did in 1999, send every validated voter an absentee ballot and count the votes the day after election day. with the candidates providing oversight. It actually cost less money and the validation process was more intense because they had all year to recheck the list of voters also working people and invalids can vote at their leisure. More citizens vote. I moves out of Oregon in 2000 but I hope it is still working.
Here is a quotation from the link-to article:
“Climate scientist Michael Mann tweeted, ‘Romney’s cynical denial of climate change is the real threat to our families, to our children & grandchildren’s future.'”
Michael Mann should have made it clear that it is not only the U.S. that will be affected by climate change; it will affect the entire world and everyone on it.
There is no doubt that Romney is aware of climate change and the problems it will cause, even though our knowledge is not exact. Obviously he is doing what he thinks is politically advantageous.
Real leaders, instead of selfishly following public opinion, would lead public opinion. They would state the scientific facts and evidence, then make it clear that we must take action to mitigate the situation to the extent possible.
If our presidential candidates were as concerned as they should be, they would get together and agree that climate change is a problem that must be addressed, although they wouldn’t necessarily agree on exactly how to address it.
While I will admit that a vast majority of politicians are entirely bought and paid for, the fact of our current US electoral system is that even if you do really support the environment, you wouldn’t do anything to push it until your 2nd term. Then if you make it that far, you had time to quietly drum up support in Congress the first term and then push it through during your 2nd term. Even those who hate Mr Obama would have to admit how much of a headache he has had trying to get anything passed, can you imagine for one second that it would have been any easier if he’d started off with an environmental agenda. The best we can hope for is that Obama is re-elected AND has managed to acquire the pull in Congress to ramrod what would be a rather unpopular amendment to the Constitution over the course of his 2nd term. Ideally without the usual pork that is associated with such a bill.
I’m not saying I’m pro Obama, or pro Romney, for that matter. But the simple fact remains, that it takes 4 years to get the groundwork laid for something like this and then 4 more years to shove it through congress unless you have a LOT of money backing you. With Super PAC contributions totaling well over a billion dollars you can figure it would take at least that much to quickly push a proper environmental bill through Congress against the companies who would stand to lose in an environmentally friendly United States.
If it isn’t Obama, then we have at least 4 1/2 more years before we have a reasonable chance of getting something pro-environment made into law. Assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t then find it unconstitutional.
I’m against corporations having the right to buy congress. However, what good is a constitutional amendment against it if there is still a void concerning a coherent clean energy path?
Currently, we have a decent fossil fuels agenda that kicks butt over all the alternatives… except one.
That is advanced liquid fuels based nuclear (such as LFTR).
Granted, solar and wind could work, but only after close to 100,000 square miles of solar is “planted and stored” and millions of giant turbines dot the planet. Until then, we are committing to even MORE excess CO2!
So, I ask, which is easier? Developing robotic factories that make solar, wind turbines and batteries capable of sustaining modern planetary civilizations…
Or redeveloping a decades old and proven nuclear technology (which ran for 22,000 hours at ORNL, shut down on the weekends and with NO possibility of a meltdown).
Bty, we need to prevent the lobby for that dangerous type of nuclear, you know, the light water reactor (LWR) because that kind of nuclear IS not safe (due to high pressures and explosive water needed to keep solid fuels contained)!
Let’s instead make a constitutional amendment DEMANDING the best kind of energy source on the national level, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. If so, we would fix global warming, fix energy shortages and thus climb out of the economic mess we’re in.
If not, we’ll be importing that too, from China!
Influence peddling has been an issue with American government since there has been American government. I believe that the framers of the Constitution regarded freedom of speech as a right of human beings to open their mouths and say what they want. Corporations are not human beings and have no mouths, so they should not have any right of freedom of speech. The people who own the corporation, who work for the corporation, and who control the corporation do, of course have the freedom to speak. Unfortunately, the framers regarded freedom of the press as a right of any person or organization who owns a press, so a corporation that owns a media outlet has free press rights even though it should not have free speech rights. The net result is that the Citizens United case was decided on the wrong grounds, but on the correct grounds would have been decided the same way – anyone can publish anything and flood the country with just as much lying baloney as if they had speech rights instead. Let us be grateful that it is no longer legal to explicitly buy votes, and hope that opposition outlets of all stripes exist so that no one big lie can monopolize the field. That is really the key – of course the rich can lie big, but we, the voters, do not have to believe them. Actually, since the press and the speech are allowed to be 100% lies, people can and should understand that nothing in any political ad can be trusted to be true without independent non-partisan corroboration. Once the conventional wisdom is that “it is all lies” it will not matter how much money is spent on them, or by whom, because nobody will believe any of it anyway.
fireofenergy,
I’m glad you brought up the matter of LFTR and similar nuclear technology. It looks as though that could be the major part of the solution for our energy problems. Unfortunately, it is receiving far less attention than it should. However, I would not totally rule out all other nuclear technologies except for the pressurized water reactor which can be made acceptably safe only with multiple layers of protection.
Without nuclear energy, it is unlikely that global warming could be adequately dealt with without condemning the billions of the world’s poor people to everlasting poverty and forcing others into poverty also. Energy efficiency should be part of the solution, but by itself, would make only a small difference.
On the other hand, I question putting energy issues into the Constitution. The Constitution is a framework for government and in general (but with a few exceptions) be free of items which are better addressed via legislation. The Constitution can be used effectively to make certain types of legislation and actions illegal, but is much less effective in causing positive action.
Part of the problem we face now is excessive influence by a few wealthy individuals and corporations. Actually, that is simply history repeating itself; we had a similar problem during the last third of the 19th century, i.e., “the gilded age.” For more information, I strongly suggest reading the biographies of the captains of industry who were active during that era. Authors have written about how the captains of industry and their agents would go to legislative halls with suitcases full of money to buy influence, which was very successful, and how they even bought judges. The problem was more blatant then than it is now. Basically, it ended with the assassination of president McKinley after which T. Roosevelt became president. He took action to end the abuses of power and influence. He was from money but also had a social conscience and was regarded as a turncoat by some of the wealthiest people.