In a diary yesterday, Digby highlighted this passage from Obama's acceptance speech:
For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.
Well it's time for them to own their failure.
After which, Digby commented:
I think this is the key to the case and when I heard it, I stood up and cheered.
I know that point is not very hopeful or very uplifting and it won't be the biggest selling point among swing voters. But there were plenty of those things in the speech. This is the case against conservatism that people need to hear in this country if we hope to move ahead. (Remind me to relate my convention story of trying to convince the 19 year old "independent" that his tax burden wasn't the reason he couldn't afford college. People have been brainwashed.)
Boy howdy on the brainwashing front! How many different times and different ways has deregulation wrecked havoc on our country? The S& L crisis. Enron & the manufactured energy crisis of the early 2000s. The sub-prime mortgage meltdown-just to name a few of the greatest hits our economy has taken from the deregulation delusion. And yet, no many how many disasters it causes, somehow deregulation itself is never to blame!
I too, was particularly thrilled to hear Obama speak this line. And yet, I wondered to myself, what will it take to really make it happen?
Sticking with deregulation, and with the case of Enron and "energy deregulation" in particular, I was struck by a story in the NY Times this week, "The Energy Challenge: Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid's Limits". In Enron's universe, making money was the key to everything. If they could figure out a way to make lots of money out of energy, then-voila!-they would solve our energy problems! I know it's hard to believe, but their thinking really wasn't any more sophisticted than that.
In contrast, a reality-based approach tells us that we need to develop new sources of energy, and new ways to deliver it where it's needed. That's what this article is about. It says, in part:
When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.
That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore's hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.
The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.
"We need an interstate transmission superhighway system," said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent.
Achieving that would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Builders are also contemplating immense solar-power stations in the nation's deserts that would pose the same transmission problems....
Wind advocates say that just two of the windiest states, North Dakota and South Dakota, could in principle generate half the nation's electricity from turbines. But the way the national grid is configured, half the country would have to move to the Dakotas in order to use the power.
"We still have a third-world grid," Mr. [Gov. Bill] Richardson said, repeating a comment he has made several times. "With the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been modernized, especially for wind energy."
This is just one example of many. In this case, the article notes, were not even talking about developing new technology-simply deploying technology that already exists. Investing in new technology as well could potentially produce even greater benefits. But it depends on approaching things from a reality-based perspective, not through an ideology based in 19th Century economic notions. The simple fact is that such enormous investments absolutely require government involvement. There simply is no other way to do them. The short-term returns that businesses require simply aren't there. One way or another government involvement is key.
We have worked ourselves into a terrible fix because we've insisted on seeing the world through narrow ideological blinders. But the truth is, there is tremendous abundance that conservative ideology-one way or another-prevents us from tapping into. Enron's vision of electricity deregulation as a panacea, rather than public investment in needed infrastructure, is one example of this. Our incredibly backward monopolistic broadband "system" is another example.
The answers are out there-not just in these two areas, but in many others as well. But first we have to recognize the systematic failure of conservative ideas, so that we can escape from their clutches, and simply, as Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Annual Message (what we now call the "State of the Union"):
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Indeed! That is the answer to Obama's call, and to my question if it is, indeed possible: We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
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