A repeat of my most recent wind photodiary (which is also front-paged on The Oil Drum today). For some reason I can't be bothered to post much on dKos these days. US politics seem stuck in confusion lately and there is isn't much to write about. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
People really thought voting for and electing Obama meant Change. ("The more fools they," he said cynically.) There is no doubt Obama is better than Bush and was better than McCain. There is no doubt, in my mind, Obama has shown himself a Tweak Around the Edges Centerist who is unable to accomplish or ignorant of what needs to be done to get the US out of the mess.
The key to change is the 2010 Senate races. Unfortunately I don't see any substantial change in the way Democratic candidates are selected, thus, the way their campaigns are run. IF the Dems run the same campaigns they've been running for the last 20 years November could get real ugly.
The only hope I see is the GOP is in even worse shape. Palin seems to have been an attempt by the GOP Leadership to rein-in the Looney Right and, by and large, it has seemed to fail. Huckabee seems to have faded, tho' it's too soon to count him out. The person who seems to be doing the best out of the mess, and even creating a Left-Right alliance, is: Ron Paul.
And THAT I don't understand.
On the left, he is (or claims to be) against torture, corporate welfare and colonial wars. Sadly, this puts him well ahead of some congresscritters with D after their names.
On the right, he is in favour of killing social security and medicare stone dead, wants to downsize taxes and appeals to the small-minded small-government fanatics.
But one should be careful not to overestimate his base. They are very vocal, and they - like the the disenfranchised left (such as it is and what there is of it) - are pretty savvy at using grassroot media to their advantage. Furthermore, like the Austrians, Creationists and Teabaggers, they have a cadre of fanatics who are very good at making noise and polluting open fora. That cadre also has the rhetorical advantage of having a rather platonic relationship with empirical reality, which makes it easier for them to produce propaganda than it would be for people in the sanity-based community.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
That cadre also has the rhetorical advantage of having a rather platonic relationship with empirical reality...
LOL
There are a few efforts starting to get underway to address these problems, as the American netroots starts to understand the predicament and is looking for new economic narratives to use as a building block for a response to both Obama's failure and to the teabaggers.
Unfortunately these efforts are still rooted in American exceptionalism - every time I try to argue for broadening these conversations to include people of like mind around the world, others reject this as either unrealistic or undesirable. There's no way activists in any one country alone can produce the changes we need and make them stick (even in the US, where global wage arbitrage will again be used to undermine our efforts, as was done beginning in the late 1970s), but old habits die hard. I'm not surprised, just annoyed. And the world will live as one
