Kemstone's Journal

I know. This whole “the media ignores important substantive issues and focuses only on trivial nonsense”-theme is old and tired, but sometimes the contrast between what ought to be getting attention and what’s getting all the attention is so overwhelmingly stark that it begs to be commented on.

Elected officials have been doing terrible, despicable things throughout history. Even if we focus on just the last ten years, we can point to politicians who have done things as awful as secretly torturing prisoners, stripping citizens of their rights and civil liberties, collaborating with health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to kill legislation that would save lives, taking food off the table of poor families in order to give tax-cuts to corporations, deliberately obstructing an economic recovery just to hurt a president’s chances of re-election, encouraging foreign leaders to enact violently anti-gay policies, starting unnecessary wars to make private contractors richer, and on and on. Every single day, hundreds if not thousands of politicians at various levels of government across the country do horrible, downright evil things.

But one guy sends some dirty pictures to women who aren’t his wife, and that is unacceptable. Torture whoever you like, start as many wars based on phony justifications as you want, take as much money from corporations in exchange for hurting the poor as your heart desires, but flirt with girls on Twitter and you are done, sir!

This week, the whole absurd fiasco over Congressman Weiner’s wiener (much of which I admit he brought on himself by handling it so poorly) completely overshadowed a story involving not just a faaaar more egregious crime than being a bit of a pervert, but also something far more important with far more real-life consequences for the American people.

Politico reported that our old friends the Koch brothers (oil-industry billionaires), through their Tea Party front-group Americans for Prosperity, is launching a nation-wide campaign to blame high gas prices on President Obama. It’s his excessive zeal for environmental protection, they say, his draconian over-regulation of the oil industry, that’s responsible for the high prices at the pump. The only solution? Drill for more oil, obviously.

Never mind that Obama’s record on environmental protection is virtually non-existent. He not only did agree to open up more territory for oil drilling, but even after imposing a perfectly sensible moratorium on drilling after the BP disaster, he’s recently begun handing out new drilling permits in spite of the fact that the problems which caused that disaster haven’t been fixed. Obama’s refusal to “drill baby drill”, as any sane observer would be able to tell, is not the reason for high gas prices.

What is the reason? Who are the real culprits? Ironically, the Koch Brothers themselves might bear the most responsibility.

Most people who know anything about the issue know that that it’s speculation in the oil markets rather than actual worldwide supply of oil that drives gas prices. Not only do corporations like Koch Industries drive up the price of oil by betting on derivatives (much like the betting in the housing market that led to the 2008 financial crisis), but they use their own resources to artificially manipulate the price in order to boost their profits. Back in April, Think Progress explained how this game works:

In 2008, Koch called attention to itself for “contango” oil market manipulation. A commodity market is said to be in contango when future prices are expected to rise, that is, when demand is expected to outstrip supply. Big banks and companies like Koch employ a contango strategy by buying up oil and storing it in massive containers both on land and offshore to lock in the oil for sale later at a set price. In December of 2008, Koch leased “four supertankers to hold oil in the U.S. Gulf Coast to take advantage of rising prices in the months ahead.” Writing about Koch’s contango efforts to artificially drive down supply, Fortune magazine writer Jon Birger noted they could be raising “gasoline prices by anywhere from 20 to 40 cents a gallon” at the time.

This week, Think Progress posted a special report detailing exactly how Koch Industries rose to become the most powerful force in the oil market, from inventing oil derivatives in the first place (there was no such thing before 1986) to aggressively lobbying to deregulate the trading of these derivatives and thus allowing them to basically do to the price of oil whatever they please.

For most people, myself included, this is a complex issue and it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. But it certainly sounds as though the Koch brothers are deliberately keeping gas prices high—deliberately making life more difficult for middle class Americans whose livelihoods depend on their ability to drive to and from work—so that they can then turn around and lie to those people and get them to blame the president so that someone more friendly to their industry can take his place in 2013. That’s almost as despicable as taking a picture of yourself in your underwear…

I could be completely wrong about all this. I’m no financial expert and I know almost nothing about the oil industry, and the leftist sources I get this information from could very well be skewing it to fit their ideology.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if we had some kind of institution in this country that investigated these issues, obtained all the facts, and objectively presented them to the American people with clear explanations so that we’d all have a better understanding of how our system works?

Instead we have a bonanza of talking heads chattering about whether we’ll get to see more embarrassing pictures of a congressman’s junk. But at least most of them preface their comments by saying, “I wish we were talking about something else.”

That says it all, doesn’t it? Even the people caught up in this circus can see how woefully pathetic it is. That’s what happens when “news” is no longer treated as a valuable, essential element of democratic society, but as just another form of entertainment from which to earn a profit.

Of the three main focuses of this blog post—the Koch brothers, the media, and Anthony Weiner—the one who has done the least harm to this country by far is Anthony Weiner.

After attending a large anti-nuclear demonstration in Hannover this weekend, I brought some of the arguments I heard to the E.ON employees whom I teach English to and gave them a chance to respond.

Those of them who are involved in the nuclear branch of E.ON Energy are quite frustrated with the uncertainty resulting from the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster in Japan, as now the German government has decided to hold off on their plan to extend the operational lifetimes of seven nuclear power plants back to their original expiration dates. The stated reason is that we now need to re-evaluate the safety of these plants given what happened in Japan (although the reality is that they just want to kick this issue down the road until after this weekend’s elections).

At the demonstration I played Devil’s Advocate on behalf of the energy industry, and with my E.ON students I played Devil’s Advocate on behalf of the anti-nuclear crowd. Here are the three strongest points in favor of not extending the lifetimes of these nuclear plants, and how the E.ON employees responded.

1- Now that another nuclear disaster has taken place, we have an opportunity to learn from the mistakes that were made there. Isn’t it sensible to put the lifetime-extensions on hold until we can look at that information and adjust our plans accordingly?

I put this question to someone who works in risk management, and while he said that it sounds like a good point on the surface, it’s actually meaningless when you look at the details. He walked me through the whole process of how risks are calculated and drew a graph of the probability curve of severe earthquakes occurring—a downward sloping line with low-intensity earthquakes coming in greater frequency to high-intensity earthquakes barely occurring at all. Prior to the 9.0-magnitude earthquake in Japan, the government had already evaluated the safety of the nuclear plants and determined that they could withstand any earthquake up to a magnitude that could be reasonably expected in Germany, which I believe is somewhere in the level-8 range.

The risk of a level-8 earthquake occurring here is still very small, and the risk of a level-9 quake is so small as to be statistically negligible. The fact that a level-9 quake occurred elsewhere in the world does nothing to change that calculation.

Nor does it factor into the equation that in a worst-case scenario—a nuclear explosion—a great deal of people will die. To an individual, death is death no matter what the cause. The harm to one person is the same whether the death is a result of a nuclear explosion or a car accident—the latter of which is far more likely.

Basically, the government spent years evaluating and re-evaluating the safety of these plants and determined that the risk of harm to the German people was low enough to justify continuing their operation until the planned expiration dates. The disaster in Japan doesn’t change that.

2- Given the problems associated with nuclear power—not just the potential for a disaster but the problem of nuclear waste disposal–shouldn’t we be working to make the switch to clean and renewable energy sources as quickly as possible? According to the demonstrators, Germany could potentially power the entire grid with renewable energy in five years’ time.

First of all, every E.ON employee is skeptical of the claim that Germany’s entire grid could in fact be powered by clean energy sources in five years’ time. But even if that were technically true, they said, it’s just not practical. The sun doesn’t shine very often in Germany and in the south there is too little wind to justify the cost of building wind turbines. You’d have to harness and store this energy in the north, then distribute it throughout the country which would require the construction of an entirely new grid, nearly doubling the amount of power-lines criss-crossing the German landscape.

Even the Germans know the expression, “Not in my backyard,” and it doesn’t just apply to nuclear power plants. People also get out and protest when they want to construct new power-lines, wind turbines or solar panels, simply because it spoils the scenery. Try to explain to them that it’s a choice between a less picturesque landscape and green energy or wire-free fields and nuclear energy and they’d probably choose the green energy, just as long as you build those pylons somewhere else.

Incidentally, Germans are already paying more for energy due to the politics of renewables. It costs more to distribute energy from windmills and solar panels through the grid, but they distribute 100% of this energy in order to boost the overall percentage of how much of Germany’s energy usage comes from clean sources. Rather than keep the nuclear reactors running at the same level all the time and bringing wind and solar into the mix only at times of peak usage, they have to keep adjusting the output of the nuclear reactors depending on how much energy is coming from wind and sunlight at any given time, which drives prices up and is worse for the long-term lifetimes of the reactors.

3- If the government doesn’t force the energy industry to invest in more research and development of green energy, what financial incentive would they have to do so? If they’re making such huge profits from nuclear plants, why bother trying to switch to renewables in the first place? If the government doesn’t extend the lifetimes of these nuclear plants, the protesters argue, it will force the industry to move toward green technology.

I thought this was the strongest point in favor of cutting short the lifetimes of the nuclear plants, but it may actually be the weakest.

First and foremost, doing this would actually have the opposite effect of what the anti-nuclear protesters want. The deal between the energy industry and the German government was that they’d put a large percentage of the profit they make from the nuclear plants into a government fund to research and develop green energy technology in exchange for extending the lifetimes of these plants. If the lifetime extensions get tossed out the window, so will this green technology fund.

The natural follow up question would then be to say that there might be no government fund, but wouldn’t it force the industry to do more development of green technologies on its own, seeing as how its energy-generating options would then be limited to the kinds of energy the people demand?

And in an ideal world, that would be the case. If there could be some sort of grand worldwide consensus among the people that they would be willing to pay more for energy, use less of it, and distribute it as equally as possible in one giant global power-distribution grid, then we could shut down every last nuclear reactor on the planet (as well as coal and gas-fired plants while we’re at it) and simply force our energy-generating corporations to give us the kinds of energy we want.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where different countries have different attitudes towards different types of energy, and where corporations can simply go wherever the profit is. E.ON itself considered taking its business out of Germany a couple of decades ago when they saw which way the political winds were blowing, but they stayed and now regret their decision.

If the German government told E.ON and the other major energy companies that they could no longer produce energy in Germany through anything but clean and renewable technology, it would be financial suicide for these businesses to remain here and they would either declare bankruptcy or move elsewhere. The only financial incentive you could give them to stay would be massive taxpayer-funded subsidies to offset the greatly increased cost of making this switch. And how many German citizens would really be willing to not only pay more taxes but much more for energy if it really came down to it?

It would be wonderful if every German would say, “Yes, absolutely. I don’t care about the cost—I’m willing to take a financial hit for the sake of the environment”. They would be a bright shining example to the world of a country truly willing to put its money where its mouth is and make sacrifices for the sake of the long-term health of the planet.

But it’s far more likely that they’d say, “France is using nuclear energy. So is the United States and China and many other countries around the world. Why should I have to pay more for my energy when these other countries aren’t willing to do the same?”

So I say put it to the people. Have a referendum. Really educate the citizenry about this issue so that everyone is familiar with the arguments on both sides, and then let them vote. If the German people want to get rid of nuclear energy and they are really willing to deal with the consequences of that decision, then by all means let’s get rid of it. I would be very happy if that were the case. But don’t say we should just abolish it and expect that a shift to a completely green-energy grid will just magically take place without angering a lot of ordinary people in the process.

For the past two and a half years I’ve made my money by working for a private language school that stays in business mostly through one major client, E.ON, one of Germany’s largest energy companies. E.ON has power plants of every kind from coal and oil to wind and solar, but generates most of its electricity through nuclear power. Nuclear energy has been tremendously unpopular among the German people for decades, and over the course of my time as an English teacher for E.ON employees I’ve heard just about all of them lament at one time or another how uninformed the people are on this issue. Anti-nuclear protests are nothing new in Germany, and the visibility of this public sentiment has made the politics of nuclear power very difficult for the politicians, as they struggle to find a balance between the interests of the energy industry and the will of the people.

As an American, it surprises me that for the most part, the government has generally responded more to the pressure of the masses than to the energy lobbyists, and for awhile planned to close down Germany’s nuclear reactors after only a fraction of their natural lifetimes. The E.ON employees I teach find this monumentally stupid, as they all tell me that without nuclear energy in the mix, Germany would simply not generate enough power to keep the grid running. They would have no choice but to buy energy from France, which generates most of its energy through nuclear power anyway. When Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Party (CDU) ran their re-election campaign in 2009, one of their platforms dared to go against popular sentiment and extend the lifetimes of these nuclear plants back to their original expiration dates. Naturally, the E.ON employees were all quite happy when her party won the election.

It took some time and much additional lobbying to get them to actually follow through on their promise, but last year it began to look as though the German government was finally going to extend the lifetimes of these plants. Then Fukushima happened, and this decision was instantly called back into question. Plans to extend the lifetime of these nuclear plants have now been put on hold so the politicians can debate it even more, giving time to leftist organizations and political parties to launch another major anti-nuclear campaign nationwide.

One of the anti-nuclear rallies took place yesterday in the city of Hannover where I live. One of my friends, Lena, the girlfriend of another friend Oliver, is a member of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) and she wanted to take part in this demonstration. I decided it would be an interesting experience to go as well, even though my opinion on the nuclear issue is more closely aligned with that of the E.ON employees I teach. I was hoping to hear some arguments against nuclear energy that I could take to the E.ON employees this week to see how they respond. My mind is not entirely made up on this issue.

Here is where my opinion is now: I agree that nuclear energy is dangerous, but I don’t think it’s as dangerous as most people think. The incident at Chernobyl was a result of poor planning and design, and the Three Mile Island incident was more of a scare than a disaster as it resulted in no confirmable loss of life. As for Fukushima, there were some design flaws as well, but in any case I do think it’s foolish to built nuclear power plants when your country is in the Ring of Fire, positioned along a major fault line in the earth’s crust that you know for a fact is one day going to erupt in a major earthquake. But in Germany, where the earth’s crust is stable and where government oversight is stricter than almost anywhere in the world, I think building nuclear power plants is quite sensible at the current point in time. The E.ON employees have thoroughly convinced me that with all of the safety measures and failsafes upon failsafes that must be put in place before a nuclear reactor can start operating, disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima would be unthinkable here.

But obviously, nothing is impossible, and even if the plants are safe there’s still the matter of the nuclear waste, which we still have no ideal way to dispose of. We should not go on using nuclear energy indefinitely, and I’m firmly in favor of a worldwide shift to renewables in the coming decades. Where I differ with the protesters is that I think we need to keep using nuclear energy for the time being, as the technology behind wind and solar power is still in its infancy and generating power from these sources is still very inefficient. Most of the base-load energy generation is from nuclear and fossil-fuels, while wind and solar only come into the mix during periods of high energy usage. They supplement the power generated by nuclear and fossil fuels, and couldn’t power the entire grid on their own by a long-shot.

So if we decide at this very moment to shut down the nuclear reactors in Germany, we would have to A) buy energy from France which is generated through nuclear power anyway, and/or B) use more fossil fuels, thus accelerating global warming. The biggest virtue of nuclear power in my opinion is that it does not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and thus does not contribute to climate change. If we replaced all coal and oil-fired plants with nuclear plants, the climate change problem would be far less dire.

For these reasons I think we should go nuclear for now, while we invest heavily in improving renewable energy technology so that we can one day move away from nuclear as well.

At the demonstration in Hannover, it felt very strange to think that I might have had the most conservative opinion there. I’m normally to the left of just about everyone in a room, but on this issue I was to the right of the whole crowd. I was hoping to engage a few people in a debate about the topic and possibly learn some things I didn’t already know, but nobody likes to speak English so the only people I talked to were Lena and others I already know.

The crowd itself was something to see. They expected about 3,000 people but I read online later that there were at least twice that number, and now they’re estimating 10,000. You could see banners and flags of all kinds of organizations and political parties there, from Lena’s communist party to the more mainstream SPD, Green Party, and Die Linke. The crowd was about as mixed as you could imagine as well, with just about every age group  represented.

Last year I attended a different protest in Hannover, this one against the military. It was in response to a group of high-ranking military officials and members of Germany’s military industrial complex meeting for a fancy dinner at Hannover’s Congress building, and the only groups there were the leftiest of the left. There hadn’t been a specific issue behind that protest other than the demand to remove German troops out of Afghanistan, but it was mostly just to yell and shout at these officials with their blood-stained hands as they made their way into the Congress building. The crowd there was only between one and two hundred, almost all of them in their twenties or thirties and looking like the stereotypical hippie-protest crowd.

But the people at this demonstration just looked like any random sample of Germans, plain and ordinary people who came out in all likelihood as their way of responding to the disaster in Japan. There were old people, families with babies and little kids, and even teenagers there. At the anti-military demonstration there had been about one police officer to every protester in case things got out of hand, but here the police force was barely visible.

There were a lot of kids coming up to the MLPD stand where Lena was working, as they had set up a little fund-raising game where for 50 cents kids could throw tennis-balls at a stack of tin cans with pictures of Germany’s nuclear power plants taped to them. Honestly, I thought this was rather silly, but the kids liked it and the Marxists managed to raise a total of €15 which apparently goes to pay for the cost of printing flyers.

I spent the first thirty minutes helping out there while the crowd gathered strength outside the opera house, and then the march began. It was then that I asked Lena if she could find someone to convince me that nuclear energy generation in Germany should be stopped, and she took a stab at it herself. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before—what about the waste? What if there’s a disaster? Etc. I gave my counter-argument that because renewable energy technology isn’t yet efficient enough to power the grid, our only two real options now are fossil fuels and nuclear power so we should go with nuclear as a temporary means of keeping things up and running. Lena had to go do something else at this point, so she passed me over to Kai, a guy I met at the MLPD New Years’ Eve party, who struggled to find the English to explain why I was wrong. He said that Germany produces more energy than it uses and that it exports 7%, so if they just stopped exporting they wouldn’t need nuclear, an argument I found very un-convincing. But he also insisted that Germany could transition to a completely green-energy-based economy in just five years, a fact that if true would give me reason to reconsider my view, but I’m skeptical about that.

I stopped talking politics for awhile and just marched next to Oliver making jokes and scanning the crowd. It was amazing to see how many people were there. A line of protesters marching down the street as far as the eye could see—this was definitely the largest demonstration I’ve ever been a part of (though I’ve only been to three).

The day took a much different turn as Oliver and I got bored with the march and broke ranks with the protesters to go have a beer, which led to another beer and then another and before we knew it the protest was over and we were sitting in an Irish pub where Lena met up with us when her work was done.

Lena and I got back into the discussion and she gave me some additional arguments that I can’t wait to take to my E.ON students this week. She insisted that if they were really serious, the German government could switch to an energy grid powered entirely by renewables in five years’ time. This morning she sent me links to the sources from which she got her information, including an online pamphlet from Greenpeace, an article from rf-news busting some supposed myths about nuclear energy, an official document about the future of Shell, and a few other anti-nuclear pamphlets from various organizations. Unfortunately my German abilities aren’t good enough to parse these documents, but they at least prove that the anti-nuke crowd has plenty of facts on their side. What’s unclear is just how selectively chosen those facts are.

The last point I made to Lena was about the efficacy of these protests themselves. In an ideal world, the German government might actually respond by forcing the energy industry to convert to purely green-technology as quickly as they possibly can. But that’s not the political reality. The German government, widely viewed by the people as a pathetic do-nothing body of squabbling politicians, would never make such a bold move. At best, these protests will result in the shutting down of Germany’s existing nuclear reactors before they reach their natural expiration dates, thus forcing more energy to be generated by greenhouse-gas emitting power plants or imported from France where it would be merely come from their nuclear power plants instead of Germany’s. Germany’s nuclear problem would merely be replaced with other problems.

Lena said she completely understands that point, but she offered one last counter-point that I thought was actually quite strong: if we don’t force the energy industry to convert to green energy, what incentive do they have to do it? Nuclear power plants are like money-printing machines for the industry, generating about €1 million in profit per day. Why would they bother investing so much money in more research and development on wind and solar technology when they can just keep on doing what they’re doing? What’s to stop them from building more nuclear plants in the future instead of wind and solar farms if the people aren’t demanding they don’t?

In the coming week I’ll be taking these arguments to the E.ON employees and hearing their responses. If I learn anything interesting, I’ll write a follow-up post next weekend.

But for now, I just want to say for the sake of my American readers that while I am comfortable with nuclear plants being used in Germany, I don’t feel the same way about building new nuclear plants in the United States where regulation and government oversight aren’t quite so strict. Given what happened last year with BP in the Gulf of Mexico and what happened before that with Massey Energy in West Virginia, I think it’s safe to say that the U.S. government does not have a very good track record of making sure corporations don’t cut corners. The cutting of corners claimed 25 lives in West Virginia and 11 lives in the Gulf as well as massive environmental damage, but these disasters would be nothing compared to what could potentially happen if a lack of oversight leads to an explosion of a nuclear reactor. Building a nuclear plant in this kind of political environment is just as short-sighted and potentially disastrous as building one in a volatile geological environment.

As for those victims and potential victims of the nuclear industry in Japan, my heart goes out to them and I sincerely hope that the worst is behind them. It is entirely appropriate that this crisis makes us take a second look at nuclear power generation, but let’s make sure we have an intelligent discussion instead of just a massive knee-jerk reaction, and that the policy changes we make are based in facts and not just political calculation.

Although I’ve been living in Germany for more than two years now, I rarely write about its internal politics, mostly because I don’t feel confident enough in my understanding of the system to comment intelligently. However, there are some things I know enough about to form a solid opinion, and nuclear energy is one of them.

Full disclosure: The language school I work for has a contract with one of Germany’s largest energy companies, so most of my income comes to me (indirectly) from the energy industry. Not that such a thing would influence my opinion (I’ve worked for companies I hate before) but discussing the issue with people in the industry has no doubt had some effect. Most of the information in this entry comes from them.

You might have heard about the recent protests in Dannenberg, at which tens of thousands of demonstrators blocked the railway tracks in an effort to stop a shipment of nuclear waste returning to Germany for storage after processing in France. The shipment was headed to the town of Gorleben, where the residents successfully managed to bring in Greenpeace to turn what had been purely a “not in my backyard” issue into an international rebuke of nuclear energy in general.

I am a bleeding-heart liberal, so I am a fan of Greenpeace and of protests in general, but on this issue I have to disagree with the demonstrators.

When it comes to potential sources of energy, they all have their downsides. Oil and coal pollute the air and accelerate global climate change, hydro-electric dams wreak havoc on the surrounding environment, and nuclear energy produces radioactive waste. People who live near facilities in which this waste is stored have a legitimate gripe.

But the fact is we need to produce energy somehow, unless we want to go back to a pre-industrial civilization. [While I personally wouldn’t mind that, I’ll just assume for the sake of this entry that we all do want to keep the engines of civilization churning.] It would be nice if we could run our cities using nothing but clean and renewable energy, but as of now this is just not feasible. Current technology for harnessing wind and solar energy does not output nearly enough to sustain civilization at its current level.

The only realistic options are fossil fuels or nuclear power. Since nuclear energy doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, it seems the logical choice. The radioactive waste is a problem, but only for the local areas in which that waste is stored. It doesn’t harm the environment on a global scale like fossil fuels do. Furthermore, the amount of radiation that people who live near storage sites are exposed to isn’t terribly harmful—I wouldn’t say it’s harmless but it’s not much worse than tobacco, alcohol, or any of the other poisons people put into their bodies voluntarily—and those people do have the option of moving somewhere else (as much trouble as that might cause them).

I therefore agree with Chancellor Merkel that nuclear energy should be considered a “bridge” technology—something to keep Germany’s cities operating until clean energy technology can completely replace it.

What Germany has been facing over the last decade with regards to nuclear energy is a political problem. Unlike the United States, Germany has more than two major political parties. They have the two big ones—the conservative CDU (Merkel’s party) and the more labor-friendly SPD—but they also have a few other major players including the far left “Linke” party, the business-friendly FDP and the Green Party. This means that there is almost never a single political party with a plurality of votes in the parliament. To form a working majority, the party with the most seats has to form a coalition with another party.

When the SPD was in power, they formed a coalition with the Green Party, and one of the Green Party’s demands was to phase out all nuclear energy from Germany. They successfully passed legislation that would force all nuclear power plants to shut down before their expiration dates, cutting their operational life-spans by more than ten years in most cases.

When the CDU took over the majority, they had to form a coalition with their arch-rival SPD, which made passing legislation about as impossible as it is in the United States when the government is divided. Nothing was done on the nuclear issue, but when the FDP gained enough seats in the last major election a new coalition was formed between them and the CDU. One of the promises made before the election was that a CDU-FDP (or “Black-Yellow” referring to the parties’ designated colors) coalition would re-extend the life-spans of Germany’s nuclear plants back to their original expiration dates.

This is an important point that has been overlooked by nearly everyone reporting on the protests. Nobody in the government is proposing building more nuclear power plants or even extending the life-spans of those currently operating. They only want to allow those plants to run as long as they were originally intended.

Try telling that to the protesters. Their hearts are in the right place, but what they want just isn’t practical. Without its nuclear plants, Germany simply wouldn’t have enough energy to make it through the next ten years. They’d have to make up for the shortage by buying their energy from France. And guess where most of France’s energy comes from? Nuclear power.

The Green Party has promised to fight the Black-Yellow coalition’s efforts to keep the nuclear plants running, and it will soon be decided in court whether this can be done by simple declaration or if it must be done with a majority vote. If it requires a majority vote, the measure will fail because recent local elections have cost the Black-Yellow coalition their plurality.

I find it slightly ridiculous that so much energy is being wasted (pun intended) on this issue. The protesters calling for the abolition of nuclear energy in Germany remind me of Tea Party protesters calling for more deregulation of the financial industry. Both are espousing a cause that if successful will actually do more harm to their country than good.

It would seem that even in Germany, people respond with knee-jerk reactions before thinking things through. They hear “nuclear energy” and think of Hiroshima and Chernobyl and decide that it must be bad—end of story. Pay no attention to nuance: to the fact that Germany’s laws require so much oversight and so many safety precautions that a Three-Mile-Island-like situation would be unthinkable here, that nuclear energy is far cleaner than most of the viable alternatives, and that Germany simply can’t operate without it right now.

The real criminals, however, are the politicians who use the nuclear issue to boost their popularity and deliberately mislead the public into believing it’s more dangerous than it is and who ignore the practical costs of its elimination.

Hopefully we will one day be able to power the entire world with clean and renewable resources, but we’re not there yet. Until then, we have to go with less-than-ideal technology, and since the alternatives do far more harm to the planet I’d say nuclear is our best option for the moment. People should eventually demand the complete elimination of nuclear energy, but the demonstrators currently protesting in Germany are at least 50 years too early.

I often rail against the “power-elite”—wealthy individuals and corporations who use their massive amounts of power to influence politics, usually to the effect of funneling money from the lower and middle-classes to the wealthiest of the wealthy. I usually think of them as some kind of abstract, faceless entity—which is just how they like it. But today I can be more specific. I can show you the face of The Enemy:

America, meet Charles and David Koch. They were recently featured in a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, and in a segment on the Rachel Maddow show in which Mayer was interviewed. For anyone with the time to spare and the desire to know exactly who is destroying America and how, I’d strongly urge you to read the article, watch the clip, and tell everyone you know about Koch Industries—especially Tea Party conservatives.

For those with less of an attention-span, here is the basic story. It began with Fred Koch, who in 1927 invented a more efficient process for turning oil into gasoline. Seen as a threat by other American oil companies, he was shut out of the industry, and spent the 1930s building oil refineries in the Soviet Union where he witnessed the brutality of the Stalin regime. Upon his return to America he fell in with arch-conservative groups like the John Birch Society, and eventually passed on his fiercely anti-socialist ideology to his sons:

David Koch recalled that his father also indoctrinated the boys politically. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, and the author of “Radicals for Capitalism,” a 2007 history of the libertarian movement. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”

After his death in 1967, his sons renamed his business Koch Industries and used their oil wealth to promote libertarian ideals. So far, nothing too sinister.

Nor was there anything sinister about David Koch running for Vice President in the 1980 election on the Libertarian ticket. His party only got 1% of the vote, but that’s democracy. If people reject your ideas, you don’t win political power.

Unless you set out to directly instill your ideas into the public.

The Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

After the 1980 election, Charles and David Koch receded from the public arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists.

The Kochs have given hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations that criticize environmental regulation and advocate for lower taxes on industry. They’ve poured millions into disputing the science behind climate change, and just to hedge their bets have pushed the idea that even if the earth is warming up, it’s actually a good thing: “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food” David Koch once argued.

Of course conservatives can point to people like George Soros, who spends millions promoting liberal causes, and say that the Koch Brothers are doing the same thing—merely using the capital they’ve earned through their financial success to promote ideas they believe in. The counter-argument is that Soros gives money to causes that actually go against his own financial interests, while the Koch Brothers put their money behind groups that do work which positively effects their bottom line. They “earn” their fortune by spending it on groups that help them increase their fortune, usually by lying and distorting the facts.

But it actually goes much deeper than that:

The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

Koch Industries is the group behind Americans For Prosperity, one of the leading organizations behind last years’ Tea Party protests in which thousands of Americans were bussed from district to district and told to interrupt town hall meetings on Health Care reform. Tricked into believing that the bill was some kind of nefarious government plot to euthanize senior citizens, frightened conservatives held rallies in which they hung effigies of Democratic lawmakers, held up banners depicting corpses from Dachau, and relentlessly compared Obama to Hitler.

These protests are now widely believed to be the pivotal moment at which the Obama presidency began its slow downward spiral. When asked about the Republican Party’s efforts to kill the health care bill, conservative Grover Norquist replied:

The Republican leadership in Congress, he said, “couldn’t have done it without August, when people went out on the streets. It discouraged deal-makers”—Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said. “When Obama was strong, the Chamber of Commerce said, ‘We can work with the Obama Administration.’ But that changed when thousands of people went into the street and ‘terrorized’ congressmen. August is what changed it. Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough.”

The Koch brothers’ war on Obama seems to be succeeding. By staying out of the limelight, they’ve managed to avoid major scrutiny of their front groups like Americans For Prosperity, Patients United Now, and a whole host of other organizations with grassroots-sounding names. The tactic is as simple as it is brilliant—pour lots of money into groups that appear to be grassroots and thus create the perception that there is a massive resistance to the president’s agenda. But don’t let anyone onto the fact that the objections to the president’s agenda were falsehoods cooked up by your own think-tanks and spoon-fed to the American people.

“To bring about social change,” Charles Koch once told a reporter, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.”

So now you know the Enemy, or at least a couple of their faces. The question is how you can fight it. Well, you can wait for Obama to do it for you. After all, they’re deliberately targeting him and his agenda so you’d think he’d fight back strong. After all, he did say at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser in Austin that:

the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

But apparently that didn’t get the message across. For some reason Obama doesn’t want to name names and call any of his enemies out for what they’re doing. He must be one of the most passive-aggressive presidents of all time. Maybe he’s afraid they’ll spend even more of their money to defeat him, as if they weren’t already going after him with everything they’ve got.

So I wouldn’t count on Obama or any of the weak and spineless Democrats to fight this battle for us. All we can do is take the time to learn who these people are and to let everyone else know as well.

Once we know, we can follow the money back to its source. Unfortunately most of it comes from oil, but there are plenty of other products that are brought to you by the fine people at Koch Industries, including:

• Brawny paper towels
• Dixie cups
• Georgie-Pacific lumber
• Stainmaster carpet
• Lycra

I for one don’t plan on buying Brawny paper towels or Dixie cups any time soon. I hardly think that’ll take down Koch Industries and be the end of the Tea Party Movement, but it’s an easy way to make a statement. These people hide from the limelight precisely because they don’t want their products associated with radical libertarian ideology and the destruction of the Obama presidency.

And even we do manage to take down Koch Industries, there are plenty of multi-billionaires who will quite happily continue their work of destroying the environment and funneling all the world’s wealth and resources into as few hands as possible. I may have an idea for how we can begin to tackle that problem, but it needs a bit more work. Stay tuned…

When Cris Hayes guest-hosted the Rachel Maddow Show last week, he had a lot of great segments. This one in particular got me thinking:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The part that made me go “damn…” comes at 3:45 when he interviews Michael Klare, author of Rising Power, Shrinking Planet, who points out that we’ve pretty much tapped out all of the “easy energy” that the planet has to offer. When it comes to oil, you go for the easy stuff first—oil in shallow waters relatively close to the shore, safe to extract geologically, and in safe countries. Most of that has now been used up, so if we still want to drill for oil we have no choice but to drill at increasingly greater depths.

We have the technology to drill at one or two miles of ocean depth, but as the BP disaster made completely clear, we don’t have the technology to deal with the situation when something goes wrong. Even in shallow water it takes 10-12 days to stop a leak, and apparently in deep water it can be a matter of months.

Obviously, we can do two things: we can stop drilling for oil at dangerous depths, or we can develop the kind of technology necessary to stop a spill when it happens. Either way, a moratorium on drilling while we figure it out would seem to be a no-brainer, unless you’re a federal judge with stock in the oil industry.

Another no-brainer, it seems, would be to get to work on a new comprehensive energy policy that would take into account the fact that the risk of a drilling disaster is only going to increase as time goes on. But apparently that’s just too politically difficult right now (as though it will ever be easy) so we’re not going to do that either.

Sorry, Earth. We know that we’re destroying you but it would be too much trouble to stop. I guess we’ll keep at it until you decide it’s time to get rid of us.

“But you don’t understand,” they say. “This is a conservative country. You liberals want all these reforms but you ignore the fact that most Americans disagree with you.”

As one of those liberals who is constantly haranguing Obama for not delivering on the progressive changes he promised in his campaign, I hear this argument all the time and not just from conservatives. Obama apologists insist that I just don’t understand how unpopular my ideas are. Obama is the president of all Americans—not just progressives. He has to lean conservative because America is conservative.

Well, that may be the conventional wisdom, but as is often the case it turns out that it’s actually just conventional bullshit. The pundits constantly repeat their mantra that “This is a center-right country.” They said it in 2004 when Bush was re-elected and republicans gained seats in congress, and back then it might have been justified. But they said it again in 2006 when democrats regained control of the House and Senate, insisting that the particular democrats who won only did so because they were more conservative. And I clearly remember on the night of the 2008 election, after Barack Obama won the presidency with a huge majority, that the pundits were still saying, “In spite of this, it’s still a center-right country.”

Why does this conventional bullshit exist? Two reasons. The first is that it’s useful for the establishment if everyone believes that most of the country is conservative. One of the core elements of conservatism is the resistance to change, and naturally those who benefit from the existing power structure have an interest in preventing any changes to it.

The second reason is poll-data, and it’s the cold, hard, indisputably factual nature of this data that continues to allow people to get away with the claim that most Americans are conservative. This is the Gallup Poll they’re always thinking of:

Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

What gets left out of this picture is the all-too-obvious fact that the poll doesn’t actually tell us whether someone is conservative or liberal, but only the words they choose to describe themselves. There is a difference between a self-identified conservative and an actual conservative.

All right, you might be saying, but where is the poll-data that shows that the majority of the country is actually liberal? Well I’m glad you asked, because it just so happens that this data really exists. Media Matters did a study in which they collected poll-data which indicates what Americans think on an issue by issue basis. Now before you go saying that Media Matters is a totally biased, radical left-wing organization, you have to consider that they collected this data from the most reliable, unbiased polling organizations out there: American National Election Studies, Gallup, Pew Research Center, etc.

Any liberals who are seriously looking to win this argument with conservative friends ought to read the entire study in detail and memorize some of the statistics, but for those without that much of an attention-span, I’ll offer a [somewhat] more brief and hopefully more colorful presentation of the findings. I certainly won’t cover all that data but I’ll present a large enough sampling.

If you look at the numbers, you’ll see that when you ask about specific issues, the majority of Americans consistently take the more liberal position. That means that not only is America itself is more liberal than everyone thinks, but that many self-described conservatives are more liberal than they think as well. Wherever you think you might fall on the ideological spectrum, answer these questions honestly and see just how liberal or conservative you really are.

The Roll of Government

Everyone knows that Americans hate Big Government and would rather make it so small that you could drown it in a bathtub, right? This is probably the biggest unifying idea behind the entire Tea Party Movement. Let’s see how you (and America) really come down on this issue.

1. Would you say “The less government, the better” or “There are more things the government should be doing”?
2. Can the Free Market can handle complex economic problems without government involvement or do we need a strong government to handle complex economic problems?
3. Do you agree or disagree that the government should provide more services even if it means an increase in spending?
4. Agree or disagree: “The government should care for those who can’t care for themselves”?

How did you do? As for how America did, the results may surprise you. 58% said the government should do more things as opposed to 42% who think it should do less. 67% said we need strong government to handle the economy while only 33% said the Free Market can take care of itself. 43% agreed that the government should provide more services even if spending increases, but only 20% disagreed. Finally 69% agreed that the government should care for those who can’t care for themselves. It turns out that Big Government isn’t as unpopular as they’d have us believe.

Business and Unions

Businesses are good and unions are bad, right? Most Americans think government should stay completely out of the business sector and let the Free Market work its magic. Unions are an unnecessary burden on business-owners who need to be free to make as much profit as possible. Let’s see what you think:

5. Should government reduce income differences?
6. Should business strike a fair balance between profits and public interest?
7. Does America benefit from Free Trade, or is it harmed by the global economy?
8. Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions?
9. Do you favor or oppose an increase in the minimum wage from $5.15/hour to $7.25/hour?

When it comes to income disparity, 47% said the government should take steps to reduce it but only 35% said it shouldn’t. 58% agree that business should strike a fair balance between profits and public interest, while only 38% disagree. 48% of Americans say the country is harmed by Free Trade agreements while only 25% say we benefit from the global economy. Much to my personal surprise, 56% of Americans have a favorable opinion of unions while 33% have an unfavorable view. And a whopping 84% favored the increase of the federal minimum wage while only 14% thought $5.15 was enough for those clods at the bottom of the social ladder.

Taxes

Everybody hates taxes. Surely we’re an extremely conservative country when it comes to taxes. That’s how republicans keep getting elected, isn’t it? Obviously if you ask Americans questions about taxes, you’ll see that the big-spending liberals are in a dismal minority.

10. Do you think your own taxes are too high, too low, or about right?
11. Do you think taxes for upper-income people are too high, too low, or about right?
12. Do you think taxes for corporations are too high, too low, or about right?
13. Which do you think is more effective in stimulating the nation’s economy: tax-cuts or spending on infrastructure?
14. Were the Bush tax-cuts worth it or not?

Well, not surprisingly, 53% of Americans think their taxes are too high, but wouldn’t you think that number would be higher? It turns our that 41% of people think they’re tax-level is about right (only 2% think it’s too low). As for the rich, wouldn’t most Americans say that rich people should get to keep most of their money and not be punished for their success? Well, only 9% think taxes for the wealthy are too high, while 66% think they’re too low (21% say they’re about right). As for corporations, only 5% think they pay too much in taxes while 71% say they don’t pay enough (19% think they pay their fair share).

The stimulus package was incredibly unpopular [right?] so I’m sure most Americans would rather have less taxes than more spending. Well, apparently 60% of Americans think spending on infrastructure is more effective than tax-cuts while only 34% think it’s the contrary (incidentally, the facts are on the majority’s side). As for those awesome Bush tax-cuts which exploded the deficit, only 39% say it was worth it while 53% said it wasn’t. I guess we’re not as taxophobic as everyone thinks.

National Security

Okay, now we’re getting to the area where conservatives have a clear advantage. Surely most Americans support strong defense spending and continued vigilance in the war on terror. Surely the benefits of this strategy outweigh the harms.

15. Is America more or less respected than it was in the past?
16. Is the best way to reduce the threat of terrorism to reduce our presence overseas?
17. Are we spending too much, too little, or just the right amount on defense?
18. Should the U.S. emphasize diplomatic rather than military efforts in fighting terrorism?
19. Agree or disagree: “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength?”

Even the hawks will agree that America is less respected now than in the past, with 65% agreeing and only 7% agreeing, but I’m sure it’s only because the rest of the world sucks and not because America is doing anything wrong. But wait—by a margin of 45 to 32, Americans say we ought to reduce our presence overseas, by a 43 to 35 margin they say we’re spending too much on defense, and 67% think we should emphasize diplomatic over military efforts in the fight against terrorism.

Don’t worry, conservatives. At least more people—49%—agree that peace is best ensured through military strength while a paltry 47% disagree. Although, the fact that the number of people agreeing with that statement is down sharply from 62% in 2002 might be cause for some concern.

Domestic Security

Everyone wants to appear tough on crime, so Americans must be conservative when it comes to issues of gun control and criminal punishment.

20. Do you think current laws governing the sale of firearms should be more strict or less?
21. Would you favor or oppose a law requiring people to obtain a police permit before buying a gun?
22. Which is more effective in dealing with crime: Attacking social problems or more enforcement?
23. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty?

In spite of the influence of the NRA, 56% of people think gun laws should be more strict and only 9% say less (33% say it should be kept the same). As for the law requiring a police permit, an incredible 81% are in favor with 19% opposed, which goes to show just how liberal people can be when presented with a very specific rather than broad question.

As for crime, 65% think it’s more important to attack social problems to just 31% who think more enforcement is the answer. As for the death penalty, it’s pretty much a dead-heat with opponents having just recently overtaken proponents by a margin of 48 to 47, but the trend is unmistakably drifting away from favoring capital punishment. Bunch of bleeding-heart libs we are.

The Environment

We may be bleeding-hearts, but are we tree-hugging hippies too? Surely the majority of Americans believe that the earth is doing just fine and all those environmentalist wackos are just ranting and raving about nothing. Ask yourself how much you care (a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all) about the following issues and see if America agrees:

24. Pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.
25. Air pollution.
26. Loss of tropical rain-forests.
27. Extinction of plant and animal species
28. Global warming

It turns out that when asked, 84% care a great deal or a fair amount about water pollution as opposed to 16% who care very little or not at all. 79% care about air pollution while 20% don’t. 73% care about rain-forests (thanks, Disney) while 27% don’t. 69% care about the extinction of plant and animal species while 31% are apparently speciesists. And in spite of all the campaigns to call it a hoax, 65% think global warming is a problem while only 34% don’t.

Okay, so if you ask people if they care about the environment, most will say yes. But what about the actual policies? When it comes time to put up or shut up, most people would probably put their pocketbooks above their environmental conscience, right? Ask yourself if you favor or oppose these measures:

29. Opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil drilling.
30. Setting higher emissions standards for automobiles.
31. Imposing mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions.
32. Spending more government money to develop solar and wind technology.

The results are the same. Americans oppose Alaska oil drilling by a margin of 57 to 41. They favor higher emissions standards by 79 to 18, imposing controls on greenhouse gases by 79 to 19, and favor more spending on solar and wind by a whopping 86 to 12.

To be fair, we haven’t yet asked anyone to pay for these things. Now ask yourself these questions regarding the environment and energy:

33. Would you be willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment?
34. Would you be willing to pay higher taxes on gasoline if the money was used to research renewable energy sources?
35. Would you pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources?

Well holy hell, it seems that Americans are willing to pay. By a margin of 60 to 37, most Americans would be willing to pay the price for environmental protection. We’d be willing to pay more for gasoline in order to research renewables by a margin of by a margin of 64 to 33. And by a margin of 75 to 20, we’d be willing to pay more for our electricity if came from renewable sources. Wow, there may be some hope for us after all.

Immigration

Seeing as how the Arizona “Papers, Please” law still enjoys popular support, you’d think most Americans would be conservative when it comes to immigration.

36. Which is the best response to illegal immigration: Penalizing employers who hire illegals, increasing border control, or building more fences?
37. Would you favor or oppose a program providing a path to legal citizenship for illegal immigrants currently living in the country?

49% of Americans think the best approach to immigration is to penalize employers, with only 33% calling for more border control and a pitiful 9% thinking fences are the answer. As for the idea of a path to legal citizenship, it may shock you that 80% of Americans are in favor of this idea and only 19% oppose. We’re not even a conservative country when it comes to this.

Health Care

During the seemingly endless battle for health-care reform stretching from last year into this, we were told that the country is too conservative to introduce a public option. We were made to believe that Americans are petrified of any government involvement in the health care system. Are we really?

38. Is it the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage?
39. Would you rather maintain the Bush tax-cuts or make sure all Americans have access to health care?
40. Would you be willing to pay $500 a year or more to ensure that all Americans have health insurance that they can’t lose no matter what?
41. Given a choice between a health care plan that attempts to cover all Americans, a more limited plan that would cover some currently uninsured groups, or a plan that keeps things basically as they are, which would you choose?

The results would make Tea Party heads explode. We’re apparently a nation of socialists. 69% of Americans think it’s the government’s responsibility to provide health-care for its citizens while only 28% think it isn’t. 76% of us say that providing access to health care is more important than maintaining the Bush tax cuts while only 18% say otherwise. Amazingly, 82% of American would be willing to pay $500 or more to provide their fellow citizens with health care while only 6% would not. As for the competing plans, 52% want the strongest possible plan while only 24% want something more limited (I hope they’re happy with what they got) and a paltry 14% wanted to maintain the status quo. How we ended up with what we did is a testament to the influence of private insurance.

Social (Wedge) Issues

Okay. I’ve shown you that when you ask Americans about economic or security issues, most of them lean towards the liberal position. But we all know that a huge chunk of voters don’t give any thought whatsoever to those issues when they go to the polls. They vote based on their religious moral convictions. It doesn’t matter how much damage a candidate will do to their own financial interests—as long as they’re pro-life, that’s who gets their vote.

Indeed, when people self-identify as conservatives they’re probably thinking in terms of social issues. So when we ask people specific questions about these issues, this is where liberals must run into trouble. This is where we’ll find that we are in fact in the minority, that most Americans are not with us, and we’d better compromise on these ideals if we ever want to reach out to the broader population.

So for those of you who thought you were a conservative when you began reading this but are now beginning to have some doubts, I’ll offer you one last chance:

42. Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade?
43. Do you favor or oppose making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion?
44. Do you approve or disapprove of Congress’ involvement in the Terry Schiavo euthanasia case?
45. Do you support or oppose embryonic stem-cell research?
46. Do you think women should have an equal role with men in business, industry, and government, or is a woman’s place in the home?
47. Agree or disagree: “Homosexuals should have equal job rights”?
48. Should gays be allowed in the military?
49. Should gays be allowed to adopt children?
50. Should gay couples be allow to marry?

As for abortion, America is solidly pro-choice, with only 29% in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade and 62% opposed. 56% oppose making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion while 35% are in favor. As for euthanasia, 76% say it’s none of the government’s business while only 20% think they were right to step in on the Terry Schiavo case. Regarding embryonic stem-cell research, 61% support it and 31% value cells in a Petri dish over the health of fully-grown adults.

When it comes to women, our mothers have taught us well—78% think their role in the public sphere should be equal to that of men while only 8% are still living in the 19th century.

Finally, we come to gay rights. The last of the persecuted groups to really come out and forcefully advocate for fair treatment still has a long way to go, but they’re getting there. Most people at least agree that gays should have “equal job rights”. 89% say yes and only 9% say no—while only 30 years ago that margin was still at 55 to 33.

What about other rights? 60% now say that gays should be allowed to serve in the military, up from 52% in 1994. Only 46% say they should be allowed to adopt, but that’s up from 38% in ‘94. And while only 37% of Americans now believe that gays should have the right to marry (because they haven’t read my blog post on the subject yet), that’s up from a mere 27% a decade ago. The arc of the moral universe is indeed long, but it bends towards liberalism.

Conclusion

If you’ve read to the end of this piece, you should congratulate yourself. Now you are inoculated against the argument that America is a center-right country and we should just accept whatever small amount of change we’re given because the majority is against us. The next time someone throws that at you, throw the link to the report from Media Matters back at them (or the link to this blog entry if you want to be that awesome).

If you think of yourself as a conservative but found yourself taking the liberal position on most of these questions, consider that you may only be reluctant to call yourself a “liberal” because that word has been demonized by the right-wing media for the last few decades. It’s been so demonized that many liberals have taken to calling themselves “progressives” instead, and while some insist that there’s an actual distinction there, I tend to use the terms interchangeably. But of course now they’re going after the word “progressive” as well.

It’s time for those of us who are not afraid to self-identify as liberals to push back and wear our label proudly. Not only are we liberal, but most Americans are liberal as well—even if they won’t admit it.

Only in this way can we shatter the conventional bullshit that America is a conservative country and the government must therefore govern conservatively. Once that Gallup poll data starts showing more people self-identifying as liberal than conservative, candidates who run on progressive platforms might realize that they don’t actually need to compromise those principles when they get to office—that if they just stand up and make the case for the kinds of changes liberals are calling for (single-payer health care, strict Wall Street regulation, comprehensive immigration reform, strong environmental protection, investment in renewable fuel sources, etc.) they’ll have the American people right behind them to take the fight to the establishment and to finally win.

Just another quick comment today, this one on the corrupt and spineless senate democrats:

After almost a year of trying to build consensus, top Democrats on Thursday admitted that a sweeping climate and energy bill simply couldn’t be done, faulting Republicans for being unwilling to contribute neither votes nor ideas toward forging a compromise. At a press conference on the Hill, climate crusader Sen. John Kerry called the prospect “admittedly narrow.” Majority Leader Harry Reid followed with a frank conclusion: “We simply don’t have the votes.”

I would be much more angry about this if I thought that the legislation would have had a serious impact on America’s energy policy and the global climate crisis, but had they moved forward we would have no doubt ended up with something weak and ineffective that wouldn’t have really solved anything or brought about real change but would have somehow benefited the oil and coal companies.

Still, just in terms of the gesture itself, this is one big “fuck you” to everyone who voted for Obama and congressional democrats. A radical, “Apollo-style” transformation of American energy policy was one of Obama’s central campaign platforms, and they’re just saying it’s too difficult—they don’t have the votes.

Of course you don’t fucking have the votes! You never have the votes at the very beginning. Too many democrats (as well as every last republican) are owned by the fossil fuel industry. The last thing they want is to have to vote on something that will either piss off their constituents or piss off their energy-industry pals. You have to push the legislation and call on your supporters to put pressure on these people to do the right thing. You never start off with enough votes—you have to fight to get them.

But instead they’ve decided not to fight at all. They piss their constituents off, but there’s no prolonged battle, it’s not in the headlines, nobody is talking about it, and therefore [they think] nobody suffers any electoral consequences for it.

But the worst part is that they’re saying “Now is not the right time. It’s too difficult.” Right, with a Democrat in the White House and overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, passing legislation that the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have been demanding for decades is just too hard. Maybe after the mid-term elections when the Republican Party [presumably] takes over again, it’ll be easier.

I really hate these people.

A federal judge blocked Obama’s 6-month moratorium on oil drilling. The administration reasoned that since the cause of the Deepwater Horizons disaster was unclear, we need to make sure continued drilling can be done safely. Apparently, the judge was convinced that it would do too much damage to the local economy:

This Court is persuaded that the public interest weighs in favor of granting a preliminary injunction. While a suspension of activities directed after a rational interpretation of the evidence could outweigh the impact on the plaintiffs and the public, here, the Court has found the plaintiffs would likely succeed in showing that the agency’s decision was arbitrary and capricious. An invalidagency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.

A few quick thoughts about this:

1- Interesting how a single judge could overturn a decision by the president of the United States.

2- If the unthinkable happens and another well explodes, what will this judge say then?

3- In all fairness, the 6-month moratorium was purely a political move on Obama’s part that wasn’t really going to solve the underlying issues about the inherently unsafe nature of deep-water oil drilling. It would have been nice to take a 6-month breather and really examine the issue, but in all likelihood Obama was never going to try something as radical as halting offshore drilling and moving full-speed ahead on clean energy anyway.

So let the oil-workers go back to their jobs. I would call on them to make sacrifices for the sake of this country’s long-term future, but not for the sake of short-term politics.

I write a lot about America’s problems in my blog, but this time I’ll actually offer a solution. It’s not an original idea—I’m sure we’ve all thought of it at one time or another—but it’s such a simple and obvious measure we can take to get government working on behalf of the people again that it bears repeating as often as possible.

We’ve all heard the term “revolving door congress” which refers to the implicit bribe that public servants have to cater to big industries at the expense of their constituents. Spending time as a congressman or senator may not earn you a great deal of money while you have that job, but it will earn you significant credentials for any future job. Whether it’s a place on the board of directors of a major corporation, or merely a job as a lobbyist, you can earn a lot more money when you move from the public to the private sector.

But the revolving door isn’t only in operation for actual congressmen—it works for their staffers as well. A huge portion of staffers on Capitol Hill, perhaps even the majority, are only in it for their resume. They work in Washington, make connections with the power-players, and put those connections to the service of lobbying firms once they’re done. The staffers are the ones who actually write the legislation, and if their main goal is to be a lobbyist for a big corporation, they’re going to make sure they write that legislation in a way that benefits, to the greatest degree possible, the corporation they intend to work for. That corporation will reward them with a nice fat salary when they’re finished. It’s not bribery per se, but it’s pretty damn close.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks gave a perfect example on the show last week. Having just returned from a protest they organized in Washington, he’d had a few conversations with Washington insiders which provided some additional insight into the situation. His source wanted to remain anonymous, so he couldn’t be very specific, but there was a provision in the Financial Reform package that was so transparently helpful to Wall Street and harmful to Main Street that not even the republicans could openly support it and it was removed from the bill. But when a new draft came along, the same provision had miraculously reappeared, and had to be removed again. The same thing happened a third time, and finally they realized that staffers at the Federal Reserve, who had been given the task of actually writing the legislation, had been slipping the provision back into the bill with each new draft.

How can we expect Washington to produce any legislation that works in our favor if the very people writing that legislation have a vested interest in making it work in the corporations’ favor? Public pressure made the financial reform bill much stronger than many of us expected it to be, but once the debate in front of the cameras was over the bill got fatally weaker. When all is said and done, there will be enough fine print and loop-holes so as to make Wall Street feel as though the whole legislative battle had been nothing but a dream and things can continue exactly as before.

The solution is painfully obvious, so obvious that it’s a wonder the public isn’t demanding it so loudly and forcefully that congress has no choice but to act: close the revolving door.

There are already rules that prohibit congressional staffers from lobbying their former colleagues for at least one year after they leave those jobs. But a mandatory year-long waiting period is a joke. Of course they’re just going to wait out the year and go to work for the lobbying firm the minute they can. For a huge portion of them, that’s their exact plan. Help to sabotage financial reform, wait a year, then go to work for a Wall Street bank. Help to sabotage health insurance reform, wait a year, then go to work for a private health insurance company. Now, help to sabotage energy legislation, wait a year, then go to work for an oil company.

Some say we should insist that they expand the waiting period to five or ten years, but we all know what happens when we start from an already-compromised position. We have to insist that they completely prohibit all public servants and their staffers from ever working as lobbyists for as long as they live. Don’t just slow down the revolving door—destroy it completely. If we keep demanding this, we might reach a compromise whereby the waiting period is extended. That will at least improve the situation a little.

But what’s wrong with demanding the life-long ban? Why shouldn’t we insist that if you want to work as a public servant, you must give up the opportunity to be a lobbyist? The government’s job is to work on behalf of the people, to protect our interests from the interests of giant organizations—be it a country or a corporation—whose interests conflict with ours. If you want to work for the government, why shouldn’t we say that you then have to give up your right to lobby the government on behalf of those organizations?

There should be no financial incentive to work for the government. The only incentive any public servant should have is to serve the public. Destroy the revolving door and all those single-minded greed-driven individuals who only use government as a springboard for their future careers will have to find another path to success. The government will once again be composed of principled people whose only desires are to do some good for their communities and their country.

If anyone who reads this knows anyone with the know-how, the skills, and the resources to organize a campaign to demand this badly needed change to our system, I hope you’ll encourage them to take up this fight. This is a cause that Americans from across the political spectrum would support, and if enough of us demand it we can’t possibly be ignored.