It's true, Rush Limbaugh is a racist idiot and vicious propagandist. One of his recent exercises in inhumanity included telling New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin that he should "just go kill [himself]", as noted at Media Matters, after Revkin said that "probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."
There is a wealth of material indicating that wingnut heads spontaneously explode when someone suggests that white Americans shouldn't have as many babies as possible in service to the noble goal of crowding out the lazy brown hordes coming to take our jobs. It's creepy, but not breaking news. When Revkin suggested, as a thought experiment, directing carbon credits towards discouraging people in America (and elsewhere, but we'll get to that) having children, Limbaugh's cranial pressure differential reached critical levels.
In the ensuing October 20th rant, the same one where he suggested Revkin off himself, we get to the meat of Limbaugh's damage:
We don't even have to talk about getting married. We don't even have to talk about being a couple. I mean men have no say now, really, in whether a child is born or not, legally I mean. So would a man have any way of benefiting from the carbon credit?
If men don't have control over something, and especially if they can't benefit from it, Limbaugh is opposed. If you needed an object lesson today on why feminism remains relevant, well, there you are.
However, the fact-on-the-ground that many men do insist on control and the greater share of direct benefits from everything within their purview, gets at the underlying problem with Revkin's thought experiment. Just because Rush Limbaugh doesn't like you, it doesn't make you right in all particulars.
If anything, the population-climate question is more pressing in the United States than in developing countries, given the high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions here and the rate of population growth. If giving women a way to limit family size is such a cheap win for emissions, why isn't it in the mix?
Well, here's why. Because if you were really serious about reducing the birth rate, you'd be campaigning first and foremost for women's rights. If you aren't campaigning first and foremost for women's rights, then your push for greater contraception access will never get you where you think you want to go. Also, it can come off badly.
In my first diary yesterday, I questioned whether, as Chris argued, another wave election victory for Democrats, based primarily on the Iraq War, would be enough to produce a genuine realignment, and the overthrow of the conservative coalition. I picked up on David Sirota's diary about a three-country expansion of NAFTA, and agreed that this sort of politics had proven deadly for Democrats in 1994, but disagreed somewhat about why and how.
In my second diary, I looked at Naomi Klein's reframing of "free market" conventional wisdom in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, and a 7-minute trailer for it. The "free market" is not natural, inevitable, noncoercive and beyond politics-as, for example, neocon Frances Fukiyama argued in The End of History--but rather the product of deliberate anti-democratic interventions carried out when societies are helpless to resist.
This is, of course, one of the key dynamics in Iraq. Although Saddam was a brutal dictator, he kept Iraq's basic social contract intact. Iraq was a Western-style welfare state, based on its oil wealth, with a highly educated middle class. The oil law we are trying to impose is central to changing all that, transferring enormous wealth to oil companies, and leaving Iraq with a vastly impoverished public sphere. (Which, of course, opens the way for "faith-based initiatives" of the Hamas, Hezboolah, even bin Laden persuasions.) The oil law is a key requirement of the Iraq Study Group recommendations- recommendations which some have proposed should form the foundation of the Democrats' alternative to Bush's endless war.
The fact that this oil law could be nonchalantly accepted in such a manner is indicative of how poorly we understand the nature of the political struggle we are in. Stealing Iraqs oil wealth-for that is what the oil law does-should be anathema, morally repugnant to us. That it is not is a reflection on our general ignorance of the "free market" dogma and its impact on the rest of the world. We simply fail to focus on the oil law because we do not see that larger movement of which it is part-a movement to extract as much wealth as possible from the poor people of the earth, which is what "free trade" is actually all about.
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