It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)    

Adventures In Capitalism

You know the appeal of venture capitalism is losing its bite in America when even Republicans doubt it.

Mitt Romney used his New Hampshire primary win to denigrate the opposition for playing politics with the American capitalist system - not just President Obama but fellow Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Romney says that both presdiential candidates focus more on the resentment of those who geet laid off in a bad economy rather than come up with a more positive economic message like his own - about how how government can help people become wealthy.  Both Gingrich and Perry have attacked Romney for how he made money in his job at Bain Capital - buying companies and firing a lot of people to make them more "competitive." Rather than explain how a venture capital firm works and explain to voters why this is a preferred method for resuscitating companies, Romney instead re-iterated his desire to help everyone become rich and accused his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of giving the Democrats fodder for the fall campaign while accusing President Obama of wanting to transform America into a European-style social welfare state.

With Romney having moved to the right in his party, Obama is now obliged to defend his own turn from the center of American politics and explain how his leftward drift on economic issues - taxation, health care - is meant to benefit everyone. For the President, the 2012 campaign will be an effort to present the case for more government intervention in the economy even as Romney is already making his case (again, the old adage that our system allows people to work hard and hopefully become wealthy) against it.  But fewer people are buying that Horatio Alger message these days. Expect Obama's talking points to reflect the economic speech he gave in Kansas in December.

Obama doesn't have to worry about being called a socialist - he's not even that much of a liberal. But he can point to how he's created more jobs than Mitt Romney. General Motors has been hiring lately. Chrysler's sales were up 26 percent in 2011. Bailing out auto companies with government money did more for capitalism than taking over companies and firing people - or just letting them go bankrupt and possibly out of business, as Romney advocated in his opposition to the auto company bailouts.

Uncertainty

A lot of people and companies sitting on billions of dollars of cash and being in a position to start hiring workers again - i.e., "create jobs" - say they can't do so just yet . . . because of all the "uncertainty" in the economy.

What? Isn't uncertainty a given factor in business?  Uncertainty plays a role in just about every business decision.  When Henry Ford started his namesake company and began producing cars for a mass market at a time when automobiles were mostly for rich people, there must have been some uncertainty as to how it would work out.  When Bill Gates started  a software company envisioning a personal computer in every household at a time when when the Internet was only for military applications, there must have been uncertainty there.  No matter how confident Henry Ford or Bill Gates was, there must have been someone around saying to either one of them, "I'm not sure you're going to make it." 

Success in business, to quote a redundant Billy Joel lyric, is not automatically a certain guarantee.  There's always a huge risk that a business will fail, and the statistics favor failure.  In fact, some of the biggest failures in business were caused by the attitude that there was no way a venture could fail.  John DeLorean was confident in his dream of making his own cars.  Remember Wang Computers?  Now you can forget it.

How about failed products made by successful companies? Again, consider cars and computers. Someone must have been overconfident that IBM's PCjr. would be a hit.  Henry Ford II, grandson of the original Henry, was certain that the Edsel would be a success back in 1958.  And, in the case of a hit the younger Ford thought would be a miss, he had given up an opportunity to take over the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg a decade earlier, for free; his top executive, Ernest Breech, said the plant was "not worth a damn."  Ironically, uncertainty played a role in Ford's decline of the offer from the Allied forces occupying Germany, largely due to Cold War tensions and the fact that Wolfsburg was only five miles from the border with communist East Germany.

So, there's plenty of uncertainty in starting businesses and in expanding them with new products.  It seems to me that hiring more people to handle the products and services companies already provide would actually be less risky than either of those things.  

But try telling that to the shareholders.

Any Jobber Got The Sack

Jobs, jobs, jobs. You'd think that's all the Republicans care about, since they keep snapping at President Obama for not having done enough to help create enough jobs. Try using that line with the folks at English Paving of Clifton, New Jersey, who, thanks to federal stimulus money, got a contract to repave part of Bloomfield Avenue, the main street connecting Newark with its northwestern suburbs. (Don't try that line on me; I've had to drive on the milled pavement far too often.)

So what have the Republicans done to promote job growth? Well, they've blocked job legislation this week in the Senate that, among other things, would have extended unemployment insurance to jobless Americans who are about to run out of benefits. But then those people dependent on unemployment insurance - which they've paid into with their taxes - are just a bunch of spoiled layabouts. That's what Republican U.S. Senate nominee Sharron Angle in Nevada says.

The Republicans claim to be about creating jobs, and they won't help people who can't find jobs? Who are they kidding? Apparently, a lot of people; the Guardians Of Privilege (note the initials) are still favored to make big gains in the midterm congressional elections, and Angle leads incumbent senator Harry Reid by about seven points in one poll.

So is there any Republican doing anything to preserve jobs? As a matter of fact, there is. In New Orleans, federal judge Martin Feldman, a Reagan appointee, threw out President Obama's moratorium on deep-water oil drilling, dismissing it as capricious. Feldman, who obviously hasn't watched any underwater video camera footage of gushing oil recently, cited the detrimental effect it would have on jobs in the petroleum industry. Perhaps Feldman would have more empathy for the fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico who have lost their livelihoods if he had financial interest in seafood processors and not in two of BP’s largest shareholders, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase.

Martin Feldman is not to be confused with the late British comic actor Marty Feldman, though such confusion is understandable. This ruling sounds like a joke from a comedian.