Trashed

On George W. Bush's watch, we've seen the trashing of the US budget, the city of New Orleans, the US investment banking industry, the US mortgage industry, the US global reputation, the nation of Iraq, and now the Big Three US automakers.

Bad as this sounds, it utterly obscures the savage and ongoing pain that Bush and the Republicans have delivered to average Americans and Iraqis. Pain is too small a word for lives rubbed out and homes and farms lost and lifetime savings wasted by fraud, for a severely trashed job market, for a flood of lost businesses, for homes wrecked and families separated by financial disaster. I don't know that Americans younger than 80-something have any real frame of reference for what has been unleashed on this country.

A handful of men and women, propelled into office by election fraud and a corrupt Supreme Court, have done graver and in some ways more enduring damage and brought more anguish to American families than anything since the other gigantic Republican-induced disaster, the Great Depression.

I'm not trying to state the obvious. It's just that it occurs to me that most of us take a mechanistic view of these developments. We've been told so often that the causes are incomprehensible, complex, remote and technical that we retreat into a kind of dull stupor to numb the anguish.

But the causes aren't remote and incomprehensible. They're all too easy to see. Each of these catastrophes was brought about by an intentional White House policy. All were driven by some combination of greed, dishonesty, flawed ideology, arrogance, and recklessness. These -- even ideology -- are schoolyard sins, only in this case writ infinitely larger. I mean, they're not at all incomprehensible. Everyone knows what they are and what they accomplish.

But I suppose that if go there, we also have to look at ourselves, at our own role in enabling these cataclysms. Apathy, paralysis, support for that flawed ideology, endorsement of those fraudulent officials. That's asking the walking wounded to pile on more pain. Not likely, and probably at this moment not wise either.

But at some point, we have to take at least enough responsibility to explain to our children why this happened, honestly and clearly enough for them to avoid our mistakes.

It's a heck of a record, isn't it? A heck of a job.

Kyl, McCain, GOP Blowing AZ Jobs, Oil Independence

From Andrew Sullivan:

An absorbing the dizzying series of foreign policy challenges facing this president and the next, one factor obviously stands out. Oil - the damage it does and the tyrants it enables - is the great enemy, from Georgia to Iraq. Finding a way to get ourselves off this stuff is the most urgent national security need we have. Which is why this progress on solar power is so encouraging:

At 800 megawatts total, the new plants will greatly exceed the scale of previous solar installations. The largest photovoltaic installation in the United States, 14 megawatts, is at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, using SunPower panels.

Spain has a 23-megawatt plant, and Germany is building one of 40 megawatts. A recently built plant that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight, called Nevada Solar One, can produce 64 megawatts of power.

And that, my pretties, is why Arizonans should be furious at Kyl and McCain. Not just for blocking solar advancement, which is why all Americans should repudiate them, but also for allowing their partisan fusion with Big Oil to imperil 2,000+ jobs in our state. As long as McCain and Kyl and the rest of the GOP hold renewable energies hostage to offshore oil drilling (to granting more of our offshore real estate to Big Oil, that is), AZ's impressive solar projects are on hold.

GOP Trade Policy Slams AZ, US Jobs and Earnings

From the not exactly progressive Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM):

"The growth of U.S. trade with China since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001 has had a devastating effect on U.S. workers and the domestic economy. Between 2001 and 2007, 2.3 million jobs were lost or displaced, including 336,000 in 2007 alone. New demographic research shows that, even when re-employed in non-traded industries, the 2.3 million workers displaced by the increase in China trade deficits in this period have lost an average $8,146 per worker/year. In 2007, these losses totalled $19.4 billion.

"The impacts of the China trade deficit are not limited to its diret effects onthe jobs and wages of those displaced. . . . Annual earnings for all workers without a four-year college degree are roughy $1,400 lower today because of this competition, and this group constitutes a large majority of the entire U.S. workforce (roughly 100 million workers or about 70% of all workers...."

Arizona was among the top 20 job losers, ranking 19th at a net loss of 43,300 jobs due to the increase in China trade deficits between 2001 and 2007.

Ironically, the Americans who are hardest hit are the so-called "NASCAR dads and moms," the high-school-educated folks whose support for a Democrat named Barack Obama may be wobbly. Democrats, progressive bloggers, and those who write for, about, and to this demographic owe it to them to put these figures under their noses early and often.

The report is a scathing indictment of global "free trade" policies favored by Republicans, including presidential hopeful AZ Senator John McCain. Well-written and informative, the briefing paper, available online, should be read by everyone before entering the voting booth in November.

It certainly should be required reading for progressive bloggers. Though some of the blame for global "free trade" belongs to the Clintons, Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, are on the front lines of those demanding changes that we are told would help to level the playing field between American and other workers. In the meantime, McCain, who is a clone of the Bush administration on economic policy (we're a nation of "whiners," according to his chief economic policy wonk) as well as Iraq, promises more of the highly destructive gobal trade pacts.