Green Snobs

Remember the limousine liberals? Well they are back and up in arms over a new automobile that’s priced so the great unwashed can afford it. I never heard of Mira Kamdar but she has this to say in an opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News. “If millions of Indians and Chinese get to have their own cars, the planet is doomed.” I guess those people are supposed to be content with pulling their rickshaws. Anne Applebaum, who does her bit for the planet by eating organic granola bars, worries on the same page that as the world’s poor get richer they will buy their haricourts vert from farms that use (gasp) chemical fertilizers. Maybe Al Gore could win another Nobel Prize extolling the benefits of gruel. What’s prompting all this is the Nano, a small car being built in India to sell for just $2500. It has made some people suddenly realize that a couple of billion people who were once thought doomed to perpetual poverty are instead moving into the middle class, and expecting the life style that goes with it. What they don’t seem to realize is that a more prosperous world is an unqualified good thing. It is no accident that the most polluted parts of the world are also the most impoverished. Clean air is not usually the top priority for someone who is having trouble feeding a family. Only people who can afford it demand things like plentiful supplies of potable water, sewage systems, out of sight land fills, tree lined boulevards, and public parks. The green revolution was the great humanitarian marvel of the twentieth century. For the first time in modern history the world produces more than enough to feed its population. Where hunger exists today the reasons are political. It is true that phosphate runoff from the corn fields of Iowa contribute to a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi but it is also true that we could clean that up if we had the will. We certainly have the wherewithal and surely nobody would have us turn back the clock to the days without hybrid crops, compost only for fertilizer, and mass starvation. Right behind the green revolution came globalization and the attendant explosion in trade. That made possible the phenomenal improvements in living standards that so upset my environmentally conscious pundits. It is just getting started and the benefits are more than merely economic. The European continent was the hellish scene of almost uninterrupted warfare from the Dark Ages right up until 1945 but today’s integrated economies make the prospect of war all but unthinkable in that happy place. At the rate we are going that may be true for the rest of mankind within another generation or two. If that means we are to have more cars on the roads, sky high oil prices, and global warming to deal with I say happy motoring. We’ll find ways to deal with all of that and we will have the money to pay for it. When the industrial revolution was young most forests in England were cut down to fuel it. Coal came next and the air was literally black with soot for more than a century. Parts of the country became nearly uninhabitable. We’ve come a long way since then and learned a lot about cleaning up after ourselves. Now much of what was once the third world has begun to participate. That they will demand more and more energy goes without saying and for the foreseeable future most of it will come from carbon based fuels. But I don’t think we’ll all be covered in coal dust. I do think we will be better off with more prosperous neighbors. I hope I’m right because here they come, ready or not.

Government we Deserve

It’s a quote attributed variously to Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Tocqueville. “People get the government they deserve.” Living in a representative democracy, what kind of government do we deserve if we don’t bother to vote? That’s what’s happening. Collin County is represented by six delegates to the Texas State Legislature. All are Republicans. Five are up for reelection this year. None will have an opponent in the fall. Only one faces opposition in the March primary and there has been no change in the delegation since 2002. The 2-7 thousand people from House District 67 who will vote in March represent the only prospect for turnover in this term. That’s a tiny fraction of the 200,000+ people who live in the district. A few votes either way will determine if we are to see any difference at all. We must be pretty happy with things down in Austin. I don’t believe that for a minute. There are three top issues on my list that the legislature is in a position to do something about: air, water, and transportation. They are big concerns for North Texas. I had the same list in the last election, and the one before that, and the one before that… I don’t think I’m alone. Our legislators have been in office a long time and have accomplished precious little in dealing with any of them. My state representative, the only one with an opponent this term, has held his seat for 15 years. He is most active on issues related to the penal system, especially youth corrections. Now that is an important civic responsibility but it isn’t on my list of top three. Absent the current scandal in the TYC I doubt it would be on the radar screen for most people in a district that runs through central Plano and along the southern edge of the county. His has not been a prominent voice in the annual dust up over pollution generated by cement kilns in Midlothian. I didn’t see his name come up in last year’s legislative brouhaha that almost saw our long term water plan derailed at a time of near crisis. I haven’t heard from him about the proliferation of toll roads in the region, and the state contribution to commuter rail seems to be limited to a discussion about whether we will be allowed to raise local taxes to pay for it. I don’t get the impression I am being well represented. Now I don’t mean to lay this all at the feet of one legislator and I could offer the same criticism of a lot of elected officials from City Hall to the national Congress. None of them seem to be doing much about the issues that matter most to me. That’s not the point. The point is the only offices I can directly influence are those representing the district I vote in. If I keep putting the same people back in office year after year I can’t expect anything to change. When a seat is so safe it goes uncontested in one election after another that leaves an incumbent free to be as active or inactive as he or she likes on issues that may be vital to constituents. That’s too safe. In this part of Texas winning a Republican nomination is tantamount to being elected. The only vote that counts for any office not state wide is the vote in the primary. Few of us are Democrats but lots of us consider ourselves independents. If we want any say we must vote in the Republican primary. To wait until the general election is to effectively not vote at all in local races. Those should be contested elections, all of them. They would be if we had a better turnout. It’s a vicious cycle; low turnout means fewer challenges, fewer challenges means lower turnout. So make up your list. If it’s different from mine, that’s ok with me. If you can find a challenger you like, vote for him. Maybe next time we’ll get more challengers. If we don’t vote we deserve what we get.

Meeting the Enemy

On September 10, 1813, after defeating the British Navy at the battle of Lake Erie, US Navy Captain Oliver Hazard Perry wrote these famous words in a letter to then General William Henry Harrison – “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” On Earth Day in 1970 Walt Kelly had his satirical cartoon character Pogo saying “We have met the enemy and they is us.” Pogo was right. America’s statesmen and generals would do well to remember that as they plan and conduct our wars. An internal enemy produced a catastrophe in Vietnam and very nearly repeated it in Iraq. The American media turned against the Vietnam War during the infamous Tet Offensive of 1968 and the war was lost. We would never recover. The campaign was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese. Their army in the south was destroyed. But they weren’t the real enemy. The press were. They made a collective editorial decision that the war was un-winnable and repeated that message in headlines and TV news clips day after day and night after night for the next seven years. Lyndon Johnson left office in disgrace. Richard Nixon declared victory and came home. Congress withdrew aid from the South Vietnamese and on April 30, 1975 Saigon fell, forever memorialized in a photograph of a helicopter evacuating the US Embassy. The word quagmire entered the political lexicon. A rag tag third world army had defeated a super power. The American military if not its politicians learned from the Vietnam experience and in future wars would handle the media better. News conferences from forward headquarters are today conducted professionally by senior officers who understand the power of a sound bite, and of the verbal faux pas. Embedding journalists with combat units during the invasion of Iraq was a master stroke, easily trumping journalistic hacks who, as they did in Vietnam, preferred to cluster around hotel bars and get their news from each other. But that only worked for a while. We hadn’t learned enough. The media were determined to regain control and peer pressure soon discouraged most journalists from embedding, even though it meant confining themselves to fortified hotel rooms with Iraqi stringers practically their only source of news, modern versions of the old Turkish dragomans. As they had in Vietnam they made their editorial decision that the war was un-winnable and sent out their stringers to report back the only message they wanted to hear. They might as well have done all their reporting from New York and Washington. Many of them did. A lesser man in the White House would have withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2006, leaving Iraqi’s to their fate and a rejuvenated Jihad to his successor. Mr. Bush didn’t withdraw. He doubled down instead in a move that had the smell of desperation from where I sat. I am happy to say I was wrong. Iraqi’s saw an increase in troop levels as renewed commitment. The prospect of an abrupt American departure had been their only real fear, and insurgents’ only real hope. 2007 appears to have been a turning point. Sunni Arabs realized their campaign to produce chaos was having a disastrous effect on their own community, and that only George Bush stood between them and genocide. The Shi’a too realized they were at the edge of a precipice and decided to get their own radicals under control. The media are quiet for now but they haven’t given up. They have an enormous emotional investment in producing a debacle. They are still there, still ready to pounce on any sign of trouble. They will be there next time too. We had better be ready. Not even nuts with nukes can ever defeat us but we can beat ourselves.

Racial Elephant in the Room

It’s not surprising that Barack Obama would win the Democratic caucus in overwhelmingly white Iowa. He’s been a rising star since well before his rousing keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and that speech put him in the limelight to stay. Whether you agreed or not with the policies he advocated, or supported his candidate at the time, the speech was one of hope and belief in the greatness of his country. It helped that it was delivered with a flawless accent devoid of the pattern that sets so many black voices indelibly apart. The man on that dais was undeniably and unequivocally American. What does surprise me is that his church isn’t more of an issue, Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC). When I first heard about it I thought it was a false lead, one of those alarmist charges so easily spread over the internet like the rumor he is a closet Muslim. But it’s his church all right and it delivers a message that is stridently racist in its orientation. On their web site “about us” I count sixteen references to civil rights issues and Black origins, easily more than references to faith or religion. They call themselves an African people. Not once is America or the United States mentioned. They have Black values, not Christian. It is a message that harkens back to bad old days when Olympic athletes were raising their fists in Black Power salutes and “burn baby burn” was a catch phrase for the movement. It is a disturbing image and not one I am comfortable in associating with a serious presidential candidate. I haven’t seen much mention of it in the press, not nearly the attention paid to Mike Huckabee’s or Mitt Romney’s respective religions. Columnist Erik Rush did a piece on it in The New Media Journal back in February substituting “white” for African in the TUCC 10 point vision to point out how racist that would be but I never heard of him before I started researching this. Monroe Anderson apparently wrote a rebuttal to Rush for the Chicago Sun-Times but I can’t find it and the issue doesn’t seem to have stirred up much controversy. It should. Senator Obama may be sincere in wanting to be president for all Americans. I think he probably is. He may not sanction the separatist message of TUCC but belonging to a blatantly racist church should raise at least as many questions as would belonging to a golf club that excluded women. Somebody needs to start asking these questions before we go further down this path. Are Senator Obama’s values Black values? Are those different from American values? His church seeks reconciliation but their rhetoric is confrontational. With whom and how do they propose to reconcile? They have a “non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA” (emphasis theirs). Does Sen. Obama have a non-negotiable commitment to America? Does his church have any Asian or European American members? Would they be welcome? Mitt Romney has been criticized for belonging to a religious community that once excluded blacks. Why shouldn’t that standard apply to Barack Obama? Another Black American gave a speech more than forty years ago that resonated far more than any Sen. Obama has given or is likely to give. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamt that one day his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We’ve come a long way since those dark days. We have a ways to go yet and we don’t need a bigot in the oval office to get us there. The color of Barack Obama’s skin should not cost him the White House. I don’t think it will. The color of his heart just might.

Tax Farming

Whatever we choose to call it, it has been a bad idea everywhere it has been practiced and it is as old as history. There was a reason why tax collectors had a bad name in biblical times and if we continue down this road outsourcing one of the most basic public functions we will certainly be reminded. Tolls on public roads are a form of tax and collecting them should be subject to the same political give and take as any other tax, not contracted out to a private enterprise. One politician after another has been advertising this as free money and more than a few pundits have joined in. The basic idea is this. Tollcorp advances billions to the state in return for the right to collect tolls for x number of years. The state uses the funds to build more roads, assuming politicians can be trusted to use them for the intended purpose. There are three obvious questions. Why would Tollcorp do that? Where would the money come from? Would someone please explain to me why the state is otherwise unable to raise money to provide for needed public transportation? Tollcorp isn’t likely to be a nonprofit. They would expect to earn a handsome return on their investment. They would go to the financial markets for the money and anticipate enough revenue to pay interest and other expenses with a profit on top. There is every reason to think the state of Texas could finance the same project with revenue bonds at a lower interest rate and with no need for a profit. There is a very large fly in this ointment and I think we are being purposely misled. People don’t mind paying a toll when it is to cover the cost of the road they are driving on. It is quite another thing when tolls are used to supplement general tax revenues, even if it is to fund other roads. If the other roads can’t pay for themselves then maybe they shouldn’t be built. If they are for the general public good they should be paid for from general public funds. We are using tolls as a painless way to raise taxes and we are making it worse by proposing to spend the money up front while paying over time. Transportation has been a bottleneck in North Texas for all of the thirty five years I have lived here and the state has never been more than a second level player in addressing the issues. As our population has mushroomed we have sent a huge amount of revenue to Austin and gotten precious little in return. When I came here the Dallas North Tollway stopped at LBJ and you couldn’t even get from one to the other without going through a red light. Now funds from the gasoline tax have been diverted to uses unrelated to transportation, tollways appear to be the only way we will get any traffic relief, the North Texas Tollway Authority is intent on using tolls collected in Collin County to build uneconomical roads in Fort Worth, and our legislators restrict their contribution to talking about who will administer the funds, if they speak up at all. It makes me wonder why we even have elected representatives. Let’s do this in a more sensible way. Build toll roads if we must but finance them in the traditional way. Issue specific purpose bonds and use tolls to pay them off. There is no reason for anyone other than bond purchasers to profit from the transaction. When the bonds are retired stop collecting the toll unless it is needed for a major upgrade to the road. If reasonable tolls aren’t projected to cover construction costs either don’t build the road or finance it another way. Use gasoline taxes to pay for maintenance. After all toll road users are being taxed twice, once when they fill their tank, and again when they pay the toll. And let’s see if we can’t get some straight talkers in office.