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tags: business government news politics religion

Killing for Conservatism (and Probably for Jesus, Too)

Conservative Republicans, knowing that they lack sufficient clout in the Senate to block the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, are now talking about filibustering the process to —quote, “Demonstrate their differences.” The last thing that the world needs is another demonstration of Conservative “differences,” especially after the brazen murder last weekend of Doctor George Tiller. Tiller was the abortion doctor who was assassinated in church during Sunday morning worship because some Conservative pro-lifer thought that his murder would save the lives of late term fetuses. One caller to a Conservative radio talk show defended the murder by calling it “the very late term abortion of Doctor Tiller.” I guess he thought he was being clever.

Last Friday, on his afternoon three-hour rant, Rush Limbaugh spent most of his radio show whining that Liberals were “mean” and Conservatives were “nice.” I don’t know how Limbaugh defines the word, “mean,” but I think committing murder might qualify as one definition. Conservatives don’t need to oppose the Sotomayor nomination to demonstrate their differences. Conservatives are willing to kill for their beliefs. Liberals don’t do that. That’s the difference.

noreply@blogger.com (Warren Longwell) Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:34:00 +0000

Eulogy for General Motors

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE proclaimed the small stickpin tin lapel buttons that were given out to patrons when they exited the General Motors Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Billing itself with the slogan, "The World of Tomorrow," the fair became a two-year celebration dedicated to the blessings of democracy and the wonders of technology, and it was this latter purpose, the apotheosis of technology, that captured the imagination of the fairgoers in a way unlikely to ever be seen again. During those two incredible years, sandwiched between a decade of economic hopelessness and the coming horror of the Second World War, it seemed for a brief moment that anything was possible.

The Futurama of General Motors which had been designed by futurist, Norman Bel Geddes, was meant to show the American landscape as it was predicted to look in the year 1960. Bel Geddes' vision of the future included 1,500-foot-high office buildings, taller than the Empire State Building constructed with lavish use of aluminum and glass, 14-lane superhighways that would allow a driver to travel coast-to-coast without stopping for anything but food and gasoline, and small individual vehicles capable of traveling by both roadway and air. Other components of future technology, envisioned in Futurama, told the people of that time what they could expect to see in the next 25 years. These anticipated marvels, prophesied in 1939, were realistically expected to exist in the early 1960s: the cautious but feasible use of atomic energy for power production, ubiquitous plastics, television sets in every home supported by a broadcast infrastructure, nylon stockings for women, rockets capable of orbiting above earth's atmosphere, radio telephones for occasional use in automobiles, aircraft capable of carrying 200 passengers at 400 mph, antibiotics, warships an eighth of a mile long, prefabricated low-cost houses, and fresh fruits and vegetables available at any time of year.

All of this predicted wonderment was set against the backdrop of an America that had the world’s greatest production capacity, on a planet that held only 2 billion human beings, all living in an atmospheric environment that had changed very little over the previous half million years. In that time of 1939, General Motors was the largest and richest corporation on the face of the earth.

Things can change dramatically in 70 years, in ways that could never have been envisioned back in 1939. The futuristic gizmos and products and developments came into being just as predicted, but along with them came environmental pollution and global population explosion and materialistic cultural changes that, arguably, made the world no better than it was back then. Today, when we talk about “The World of Tomorrow,” we don’t celebrate this vision with optimism and eager anticipation. In a way, the fate of General Motors serves as a kind of metaphor for everything else.

noreply@blogger.com (Warren Longwell) Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:24:00 +0000

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The time I’m talking about was 1776, and the good idea was a compartmentalized government with three separate branches to provide checks and balances. The reasoning behind this was to make it difficult to change the status quo with quick and easy new legislation, because the founding fathers distrusted the prospect of too much government. At the end of the Eighteenth Century, this was the perfect form of government for a new nation on a new continent with seemingly unlimited resources, insulated from the rest of the world by two vast oceans. The government, small by design, was there mostly to provide a national defense, to forge foreign treaties, and to intervene in differences between the states.

Things change. The founding fathers could never have imagined today’s America. Electronic telecommunications have bridged the oceans with instantaneous information flow. Carbon emissions produced on this continent can raise the sea level at the margin of every continent. The earth’s largest religion, Islam, has spawned a militant faction bent on the destruction of America, and the means exist for these radicals to achieve their goals. For an entire century, America led the world with its civic-institutional progress, but now the rest of the developed world has overtaken us and currently leads us with its public education and healthcare. The free-market system of capitalism has degenerated into a modern feudalism where working serfs serve only to enrich an obscenely wealthy upper class, and now even that hideous system is broken. The thing about all this that’s most alarming, however, is that every one of these dynamics has the capability to change parameters in a short period of time. In the case of 9/11 and the Wall Street meltdown, change occurred almost instantaneously, and the government of the founding fathers, ponderous by design, was simply not up to the task of meeting the challenges in a timely manner.

If the shortcomings of a sluggish government would be a surprise to the founding fathers, then even more surprising would be the two party system that has evolved, with Democrats and Republicans, calcified around polar ideologies into an American equivalent of the Shites and Sunnis in Iraq.

Then again, come to think of it, maybe the founding fathers never expected the government they created to last beyond 250 years.

noreply@blogger.com (Warren Longwell) Mon, 25 May 2009 18:11:00 +0000

It’s Sad to Watch an Elephant Die

It fills me with a tinge of sadness, seeing the Republican Party as it tries to spin the defection of Arlen Specter. It’s like watching an elephant die— literally. It was exactly six years ago this week that I, too, made an abrupt switch and turned my back on the Republican Party and conservatism because it no longer made any sense to me. Last night as I watched The News Hour on PBS, everything about that decision came flooding back to me.

Reporting from St. Louis, PBS anchor, Gwen Ifill, was interviewing local citizens in the nation’s heartland to get their thoughts on Obama’s first 100 days in office. Not surprisingly, the liberal slant of PBS had generated a rather rosy picture, and so to offer some balance, she interviewed an unabashed young supporter of George W. Bush. He said, “I don’t trust the government to solve the nation’s problems. The government should just get out of the way and let the American people do what they do best. I trust the American people.” He actually sounded like Ronald Reagan. If his words are taken at face value, the stupidity of what he said is simply unbearable. Bernie Madoff is an American person. Trustworthy? Not on your life. And all those CEO tycoons of Citigroup and AIG— along with the other American people on Wall Street who devised subprime loans and credit default swaps— presumably these are the American people we should trust to solve our economic problems. There are more than 13 million American people currently unemployed and looking desperately for a job. I wonder if they would like for the government to just get out of the way and let them pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I doubt it.

It all comes down to this— conservatism today is nothing more than a systematized nostalgia for the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. Back then, conservatism worked. We had a clear enemy, The Soviet Union, so Reagan could denounce big government and get away with it because he could create millions of jobs by pouring billions of dollars into the military budget for defense projects. News flash to Reagan conservatives— the government and the military are the same thing.

In Reagan’s 1980s, America still had the world’s largest manufacturing base for durable goods. Not so anymore. In the 1980s, Islamic fundamentalism and global warming and the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries— all these problems were off the radar screen. The 401K was only invented in 1982, so almost all American jobs offered the potential for a retirement income as a fringe benefit. As a result, only a comparatively few people were heavily invested in the stock market, and for the most part these were wealthy people who actually knew what they were doing when it came to finance. And as for China— the word that best described China in the 1980s was “quaint.”

This is the world that modern conservatives want to recreate. I, too, yearn for those days, and if the world could go back to the way it was then, I would be a conservative Republican in a heartbeat. But things change, and the days of Reagan are as gone as Hugh Hefner’s virginity. Modern conservatism is best defined by its champions. There are the raving egomaniacs like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who are easily dismissed, but there are also reasoned, brilliant men like George Will and David Brooks. I personally admire George Will and David Brooks, but with all due respect to these men, I personally believe that conservatism today is mostly for the weak minded and the overly nostalgic. It’s sad to watch an elephant die.

noreply@blogger.com (Warren Longwell) Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Our Paradox

There’s a curious paradox in the way that Americans view the deployment of authority by the United States Government, and I believe that this is behind many of our current problems. On the one hand, we enthusiastically give our military a 90% approval rating for invading another sovereign country, but when the EPA is given the authority to reduce carbon emissions it sends a chill up the collective spines of American citizens. We watch the FBI and the CIA and the NSA expand their surveillance into our own private lives, and we respond to this with the indifferent lethargy of a lazy redbone hound dog on a hot summer’s day, but when it’s suggested that government regulators be given increased authority to snoop on the affairs of private business, we are incensed at the intrusion. We accept the notion of uniformed policemen protecting us from street criminals, but we reject the notion of tight financial and environmental regulation to protect us from corporate criminals. The bottom line is this— we instinctively trust private business and we distrust the government. We should trust both, or neither.

My personal belief is that we were subjected to half a century of a world-wide anti-Communist hysteria in which Capitalism, along with democracy, was seen as our protection and our salvation. Communism went away, but our love affair with free market Capitalism continued, and when ethics and integrity eroded in our culture, the stage was set for an invasion. The invasion, in this case, was not from foreign armies or foreign interests or foreign ideologies. The invasion was from home-grown fellow citizens who put the short term, immediate accumulation of personal wealth above everything else. President Obama has said this very thing in his speeches, but in slightly different words. I think that the President’s words don’t go far enough, however. In a larger sense, we are all to blame for our own downfall. We cheered Ronald Reagan for his philosophy of government deregulation, and at least a third of us still think that he had the right idea. We elected Republican presidents to continue this policy for 20 of the last 30 years. And now, with the country in an actual depression (although we don’t call it by that name), we still don’t get the picture. We are at the mercy of an enemy of our own making— a network of business giants who are too big to find enough food to feed themselves and who are reduced to stealing food from our very own dinner plates.

We need an SEC and an EPA and an FDA and an FAA, and at least half a dozen other agencies, all with the funding and the power of the Pentagon, to protect us from the real enemy that threatens our nation, because it’s not going to be the Muslims or the foreign terrorists that make America go down the tube. There’s actually a functioning model in the world that shows how well tight government regulation can work. The model is Singapore. We would do well to look more closely at that model.

noreply@blogger.com (Warren Longwell) Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:13:00 +0000

What the Future Holds for Bolivia

Like a lot of Americans, I mostly knew Bolivia (in a vague way) as the place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finally met their fate, so when I saw some recent photographs from Bolivia, I was shocked at how familiar the scenery looked to me. I was looking at scenes from the giant salt flats that cover thousands of square miles down in that South American country, and it looked exactly like Bonneville, Utah, and since I race on the Bonneville Salt Flats every August, I know the scenery quite well. The thing about salt flats is that they all look the same.

They’re not all the same. The Bolivian salt flats, known as Salar De Uyuni, are hundreds of times bigger than those on the Utah-Nevada border, and there’s another monumental difference— the Uyuni salt flats contain more than 75% of all the lithium on the planet. For those Americans who don’t read a lot about electric battery technology, lithium is the element that allows modern batteries to store electricity at much higher levels than is possible with any other composition. Since the next generation of cars will run on lithium batteries rather than gasoline, and since Bolivia has most of the earth’s lithium, we can look for Bolivia to become the new Saudi Arabia of this century.

The leaders of the Bolivian government, well aware of the precious resource that their nation now holds, have looked at the historical record of undeveloped countries who had something which was desperately wanted by richer and more powerful nations, and they don’t like what they see. For that reason, the government of Bolivia has decided that they will not export the raw material for lithium batteries. Absolutely none, and not under any circumstances. If the world wants lithium batteries in the abundant quantities required by future electric cars, then the richer nations will be forced to build the battery factories in Bolivia, and build the lithium batteries with Bolivian workers. Only then will the finished batteries be exported.

For those readers of this blog who are young enough to see this play out, watch for a showdown. Bolivia was powerful enough to kill the Yankees, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but don’t look for that victory to be repeated. If America can go to war over oil, it can go to war over lithium.

noreply@blogger.com (Warren Longwell) Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:32:00 +0000

Seduced By "Energy Girl"

I call her “Energy Girl.” We’ve all come to know her through her television commercials on behalf of the oil and gas industry. She first appears to us at some distance from the camera, dressed always in a black pants suit, and then she begins to walk toward us with her long slender legs and black high heel shoes partially hidden by the cuff of her black trousers, gliding in long elegant effortless strides, talking to us all the while in a reassuring voice about the abundance of energy in our own back yard. “Right here in North America, we have enough energy to power 50 million cars and 100 million homes for the next 80 years.” By the time she finishes this message, she’s close to the camera, and with her shoulder length blond hair and blue eyes she looks remarkably like the actress, Laura Linney. Energy Girl exudes reassuring innocence and integrity. Surely she wouldn’t lie to us. Would she?

There’s a problem. That North American energy is abundant, but lethal. Energy Girl is telling us a half truth. In Western Canada, on the border between Alberta and British Columbia, there is probably as much oil as in the Saudi Arabian peninsula. But whereas the Arabian oil is in subterranean pools of highly pure sweet crude, the Canadian oil is bound to rock and sand in something called the tar sands. To free the oil, the rock and sand is strip mined and then blasted with high pressure steam. It takes 200 gallons of pure water (steam) to make one gallon of oil. Amazingly, although pure water is the most precious commodity on earth, the supply of water isn’t any problem. Abundant glaciers cover British Columbian mountains at that high latitude, and the population of Canadians in that part of their country is quite sparse. One can debate about the morality of using the world’s most precious resource to extract oil, but in Canada there is plenty to go around. The problem is not with supply, but with disposal. For each gallon of oil, 200 gallons of contaminated water is created. What once was the liquid of life has become the liquid of death, for the water left over from the oil extraction process is some of the most toxic fluid on earth. British Petroleum (the company who first hired Energy Girl) initially started disposing of the contaminated wate