Obama: Captain climate change  

The Business Spectator has a column declaring Obama "Captain climate change" and looking forward to an American shift towards clean energy and smart grids.

Those nervous about the “boldness” of Australia’s carbon reduction policies and its potential impact on industry need not fret so much: Australia is no longer in any danger of having to lead the world into a climate change solution.

Not that it ever was, despite the industry rhetoric. But the election of Barack Obama means that Australia can be content with following in its footsteps. At least this time, those steps are likely to be leading in the right direction.

Climate change was singled out by Obama in his victory speech as one of the three key issues facing his new administration, along with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crises on Wall St and elsewhere.

Like others, Obama has called climate change “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation”. Where he goes further than other political leaders is in his embrace of the concept that the world needs a green energy revolution, and even present something of a “New Deal” for the domestic and international economies.

“We must act quickly and we must act boldly to transform our entire economy – from our cars and our fuels to our factories and our buildings,” he writes in his energy manifesto.

These are words often uttered by green groups at conferences, and by consultants and progressive companies – be they in any sector from developers to miners, and energy groups and financiers. But they have been rarely uttered by politicians faced with the complexity of actually trying to make it happen.

Obama’s stated climate change and energy policies call for action much stronger than those contemplated by the Rudd government in Australia.

Obama has promised to cut carbon pollution by 80 per cent by 2050, which is in line with recent European ambitions but compares to Australia’s target of just 60 per cent. Some scientists say the target may need to be 90 per cent.

The President-elect intends to implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade system, with all permits to be auctioned and will accompany this with a 10 per cent renewable target by 2012 and a 25 per cent target by 2025.

He also plans to put one million plug-in hybrid cars on the road by 2015, retrofit one million homes to increase their energy efficiency, and improve fuel economy standards by 4 per cent a year.

More than $US150 billion will be invested in the clean energy sector to help create five million new jobs, and veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which many believe is a fight over the protection of oil supplies) will be able to partake in a “green vet” initiative, where vets will be trained to participate in this new industry – in the same way returning soldiers were granted land after World War II.

Other policies include oil companies contributing some of their profits to provide direct relief to families to offset the rising price of gasoline, a crack-down on the “excessive energy speculation” that sent oil prices sky-rocketing on world markets earlier this year, and develop manufacturing centres for clean technologies.

Another interesting innovation is a proposal to "flip” the profit model for energy utilities to one where they are rewarded for reliability and performance rather than just from supporting higher consumption. The new administration also intends to invest in a “smart grid” that will set aggressive efficiency goals through improved energy transmission systems, where much energy is lost, and using advanced techniques for managing peak loads.

Meanwhile, The Age is celebrating a defeat for the politics of fear - Obama turns page on Reagan era.

The election of Barack Obama signals many things. History will probably record it as the end of the Reagan era, with the Bush administration bringing that era to an end as much as the Johnson administration provided the last phase of the Roosevelt era.

Enormous hopes are invested in Barack Obama, both in the US and around the world. The optimism unleashed by his victory will be a powerful tonic for a world mired in deep financial turbulence and struggling to come to terms with challenges like climate change.

To me, though, one thing matters more than anything else in this result. That's the restoration of some degree of civility and rationality to the American political process.

Having lived through the era of the neocons, Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, albeit through somewhat muffled echoes from John Howard, I'm delighted at the prospect of change. The tone of American politics will change substantially, just as it has changed in Australia under Kevin Rudd.

The grotesque celebration and exploitation of ignorance that characterises contemporary Republican tactics, and has influenced imitators in other countries like Australia, should be consigned to the dust-bin of history. The deliberate manipulation of fear and insecurity by cynical conservatives should likewise become a peculiar relic of past era. The vicious character assassination of public figures should recede.

The great lesson of Obama's victory is that political leaders who pander to the prejudices of their base leave a bitter legacy. We all have dreams in politics, but when we are elected to public office, we become the custodians of other dreams, many of which are very different from ours. If we want to achieve some of our dreams, we have to deliver on those other dreams.

Most importantly, we have to treat people of other views and allegiances with courtesy and respect. To me that's the most outstanding feature of Obama. The relentless demonisation and vilification of others that characterises modern conservative politics has been overcome by a man whose default setting is courtesy and consideration for others. Obama and his campaign said some tough things over the past two years, but by the standards set by conservatives, they were downright polite.

A lot has already been said and written about the implications for Australia of Obama's victory. To me the most important outcome will be a chance in the tone of politics, and an improvement in our political culture. Like Kevin Rudd, Barack Obama revels in detailed examination of complex issues, consideration of evidence and opinions, and respectful treatment of different views. That change of tone will be great for Australian politics, and great for our society generally.

Now the election season is over I'll probably be ignoring politics entirely for a year or so, but I may as well include this pre-election piece from TomDispatch by self-described "aging socialist" Mike Davis (who I always find interesting, regardless of his politics) pondering "Presidential Blindness and Economic Catastrophe" - Can Obama See the Grand Canyon?.

Let me confess that, as an aging socialist, I suddenly find myself like the Jehovah's Witness who opens his window to see the stars actually falling out of the sky. Although I've been studying Marxist crisis theory for decades, I never believed I'd actually live to see financial capitalism commit suicide. Or hear the International Monetary Fund warn of imminent "systemic meltdown."

Thus, my initial reaction to Wall Street's infamous 777.7 point plunge a few weeks ago was a very sixties retro elation. "Right on, Karl!" I shouted. "Eat your derivatives and die, Wall Street swine!" Like the Grand Canyon, the fall of the banks can be a terrifying but sublime spectacle.

But the real culprits, of course, are not being trundled off to the guillotine; they're gently floating to earth in golden parachutes. The rest of us may be trapped on the burning plane without a pilot, but the despicable Richard Fuld, who used Lehman Brothers to loot pension funds and retirement accounts, merely sulks on his yacht.

Out in the stucco deserts of Limbaughland, moreover, fear is already being distilled into a good ol' boy version of the "stab in the back" myth that rallied the ruined German petite bourgeoisie to the swastika. If you listen to the rage on commute AM, you'll know that ‘socialism' has already taken a lien on America, Barack Hussein Obama is terrorism's Manchurian candidate, the collapse of Wall Street was caused by elderly black people with Fannie Mae loans, and ACORN in its voter registration drives has long been padding the voting rolls with illegal brown hordes.

In other times, Sarah Palin's imitation of Father Charles Coughlin -- the priest who preached an American Reich in the 1930s -- in drag might be hilarious camp, but with the American way of life in sudden freefall, the specter of star-spangled fascism doesn't seem quite so far-fetched. The Right may lose the election, but it already possesses a sinister, historically-proven blueprint for rapid recovery.

Progressives have no time to waste. In the face of a new depression that promises folks from Wasilla to Timbuktu an unknown world of pain, how do we reconstruct our understanding of the globalized economy? To what extent can we look to either Obama or any of the Democrats to help us analyze the crisis and then act effectively to resolve it?

Is Obama FDR?

If the Nashville "town hall" debate is any guide, we will soon have another blind president. Neither candidate had the guts or information to answer the simple questions posed by the anxious audience: What will happen to our jobs? How bad will it get? What urgent steps should be taken?

Instead, the candidates stuck like flypaper to their obsolete talking points. McCain's only surprise was yet another innovation in deceit: a mortgage relief plan that would reward banks and investors without necessarily saving homeowners.

Obama recited his four-point program, infinitely better in principle than his opponent's preferential option for the rich, but abstract and lacking in detail. It remains more a rhetorical promise than the blueprint for the actual machinery of reform. He made only passing reference to the next phase of the crisis: the slump of the real economy and likely mass unemployment on a scale not seen for 70 years.

With baffling courtesy to the Bush administration, he failed to highlight any of the other weak links in the economic system: the dangerous overhang of credit-default swap obligations left over from the fall of Lehman Brothers; the trillion-dollar black hole of consumer credit-card debt that may threaten the solvency of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America; the implacable decline of General Motors and the American auto industry; the crumbling foundations of municipal and state finance; the massacre of tech equity and venture capital in Silicon Valley; and, most unexpectedly, sudden fissures in the financial solidity of even General Electric.

In addition, both Obama and his vice presidential partner Joe Biden, in their support for Secretary of the Treasury Paulson's plan, avoid any discussion of the inevitable result of cataclysmic restructuring and government bailouts: not "socialism," but ultra-capitalism -- one that is likely to concentrate control of credit in a few leviathan banks, controlled in large part by sovereign wealth funds but subsidized by generations of public debt and domestic austerity.

Never have so many ordinary Americans been nailed to a cross of gold (or derivatives), yet Obama is the most mild-mannered William Jennings Bryan imaginable. Unlike Sarah Palin who masticates the phrase "the working class" with defiant glee, he hews to a party line that acknowledges only the needs of an amorphous "middle class" living on a largely mythical "Main Street."

If we are especially concerned about the fate of the poor or unemployed, we are left to read between the lines, with no help from his talking points that espouse clean coal technology, nuclear power, and a bigger military, but elide the urgency of a renewed war on poverty as championed by John Edwards in his tragically self-destructed primary campaign. But perhaps inside the cautious candidate is a man whose humane passions transcend his own nearsighted centrist campaign. As a close friend, exasperated by my chronic pessimism, chided me the other day, "don't be so unfair. FDR didn't have a nuts and bolts program either in 1933. Nobody did."

What Franklin D. Roosevelt did possess in that year of breadlines and bank failures, according to my friend, was enormous empathy for the common people and a willingness to experiment with government intervention, even in the face of the monolithic hostility of the wealthy classes. In this view, Obama is MoveOn.org's re-imagining of our 32nd president: calm, strong, deeply in touch with ordinary needs, and willing to accept the advice of the country's best and brightest.

The Death of Keynesianism

But even if we concede to the Illinois senator a truly Rooseveltian or, even better, Lincolnian strength of character, this hopeful analogy is flawed in at least three principal ways:

First, we can't rely on the Great Depression as analog to the current crisis, nor upon the New Deal as the template for its solution. Certainly, there is a great deal of déjà vu in the frantic attempts to quiet panic and reassure the public that the worst has passed. Many of Paulson's statements, indeed, could have been directly plagiarized from Herbert Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and both presidential campaigns are frantically cribbing heroic rhetoric from the early New Deal. But just as the business press has been insisting for years, this is not the Old American Economy, but an entirely new-fangled contraption built from outsourced parts and supercharged by instantaneous world markets in everything from dollars and defaults to hog bellies and disaster futures.

We are seeing the consequences of a perverse restructuring that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and which has inverted the national income shares of manufacturing (21% in 1980; 12% in 2005) and those of financial services (15% in 1980; 21% in 2005). In 1930, the factories may have been shuttered but the machinery was still intact; it hadn't been auctioned off at five cents on the dollar to China.

On the other hand, we shouldn't disparage the miracles of contemporary market technology. Casino capitalism has proven its mettle by transmitting the deadly virus of Wall Street at unprecedented velocity to every financial center on the planet. What took three years at the beginning of the 1930s -- that is, the full globalization of the crisis -- has taken only three weeks this time around. God help us, if, as seems to be happening, unemployment tops the levees at anything like the same speed.

Second, Obama won't inherit Roosevelt's ultimate situational advantage -- having emergent tools of state intervention and demand management (later to be called "Keynesianism") empowered by an epochal uprising of industrial workers in the world's most productive factories.

If you've been watching the sad parade of economic gurus on McNeil-Lehrer, you know that the intellectual shelves in Washington are now almost bare. Neither major party retains more than a few enigmatic shards of policy traditions different from the neo-liberal consensus on trade and privatization. Indeed, posturing pseudo-populists aside, it is unclear whether anyone inside the Beltway, including Obama's economic advisors, can think clearly beyond the indoctrinated mindset of Goldman Sachs, the source of the two most prominent secretaries of the treasury over the last decade.

Keynes, now suddenly mourned, is actually quite dead. More importantly, the New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life.

Even with the greatest optimism of the will, it is difficult to imagine the American labor movement recovering from defeat as dramatically as it did in 1934-1937. The decisive difference is structural rather than ideological. (Indeed, today's union movement is much more progressive than the decrepit, nativist American Federation of Labor in 1930.) The power of labor within a Walmart-ized service economy is simply more dispersed and difficult to mobilize than in the era of giant urban-industrial concentrations and ubiquitous factory neighborhoods.

Is War the Answer?

The third problem with the New Deal analogy is perhaps the most important. Military Keynesianism is no longer an available deus ex machina. Let me explain.

In 1933, when FDR was inaugurated, the United States was in full retreat from foreign entanglements, and there was little controversy about bringing a few hundred Marines home from the occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua. It took two years of world war, the defeat of France, and the near collapse of England to finally win a majority in Congress for rearmament, but when war production finally started up in late 1940 it became a huge engine for the reemployment of the American work force, the real cure for the depressed job markets of the 1930s. Subsequently, American world power and full employment would align in a way that won the loyalty of several generations of working-class voters.

Today, of course, the situation is radically different. A bigger Pentagon budget no longer creates hundreds of thousands of stable factory jobs, since significant parts of its weapons production is now actually outsourced, and the ideological link between high-wage employment and intervention -- good jobs and Old Glory on a foreign shore -- while hardly extinct is structurally weaker than at any time since the early 1940s. Even in the new military (largely a hereditary caste of poor whites, blacks, and Latinos) demoralization is reaching the stage of active discontent and opening up new spaces for alternative ideas.

Although both candidates have endorsed programs, including expansion of Army and Marine combat strength, missile defense (aka "Star Wars"), and an intensified war in Afghanistan, that will enlarge the military-industrial complex, none of this will replenish the supply of decent jobs nor prime a broken national pump. However, in the midst of a deep slump, what a huge military budget can do is obliterate the modest but essential reforms that make up Obama's plans for healthcare, alternative energy, and education.

In other words, Rooseveltian guns and butter have become a contradiction in terms, which means that the Obama campaign is engineering a catastrophic collision between its national security priorities and its domestic policy goals.

Another aging Marxist is Crikey's Guy Rundle. I, for one, found his seemingly endless sentence covering the US election campaign quite amusing, given that the rest of the Australian coverage was diabolically boring and politically correct. It never ceased to amaze me watching supposedly liberal and left news outlets like Fairfax and the ABC covering Sarah Palin in a straight-faced and respectful way, instead of just deluging her with the mockery and contempt she deserved. I could at least understand The Australian sticking unwaveringly to the neocon party line and ignoring reality as steadfastly as they have done for the past decade, but really. Anyway - I liked some of the phrases in this pre-election post from Rundle, so I'll close with it - "Rundle08: I hope I hope I hope".

Cab from Union Station, that great barrel-vaulted hall, the first of many suggestions of Rome you get in this most European of cities. Sharing the ride with a young couple from Germany -- because there's no cabs, there's no hotel rooms -- who are barely aware of the election. Not because they're not interested in it, but because they simply assume that Obama will win.

The possibility of a McCain upset – something I think is a lesser, but real, possibility, around a 20% chance – does not occur to them. "But how could anyone take McCain seriously?" Frauka says. "Ja ja" says Horst. OK his name's not Horst and he says "yeah yeah" but he's totally her bespectacled biatch. The white cabbie keeps his counsel. "How would it be possible?"

It would be easy to throw back at these two harmless Germans -- and that's a phrase no-one who lived in most of the 20th century would recognise -- the old "Not the Nine O'Clock News" joke that the country became "the first in Europe to start two land wars and then win the Eurovision song contest with a song about peace".

But these are space-travellers from post-historical Europe, a place which whatever its vicissitudes, things get done, things get co-ordinated, stuff is thrashed out rationally. They have no idea what they are hitting, Frauka and not-Horst, that their travel is not in space but in time, to some place that is an amalgam of the 19th and 20th and -- godhelpus in its voting system the 18th -- centuries, a place of struggle between class, between race, an undeclared, multidimensional war that cuts up the air.

Fall trees everywhere; along the train line from Philadelphia, along DC's broad avenues, trees bursting into flame, orange, red and yellow. Fall, the season of tragedy. On Friday night everyone was out for Halloween, neighbourhoods alight with pumpkin lanterns, lights in houses, kids and parents in costumes – trad ghosts and goblins and seven-year-old Sarah Palins, hair-bun, redjacket and fake specs -- and you're reminded again of a double feeling.

One is the old mix of resentment and fascination, what Wim Wenders hit when he said "the Americans have colonised our subconscious", that wow, here you are, in a Pennsylvania suburb watching Halloween feeling, how many movies did you see in rumpus rooms, old VHSs rented from the local milkbar/video store, which had a Halloween scene in it, horrors or comedies?

Here it is, the actual thing, the real, so preceded by its simulacra that it is more fascinating to you, than it is to Americans themselves. Americans just live in America, this rather mundane place of malls and ticky tacky foreclosed houses, crappy jobs in Dilbertesque offices or chain restaurants. You -- i.e. me, but also you -- on the other hand, lived in Moorabbin, in Punchbowl, in Caboolture, in Glenelg, in Cottesloe, in (insert Tasmanian local here) -- and an almost identical American existence gained a gloss that its own participants do not feel.

More than anything you envy, as a citizen of one new world society immersed in another, how much ceremony they have, how much ritual, how much American life is still beyond profanation, is the sacred. Halloween, the State of the Union, Thanksgiving, Homecoming*, Prom Night and Graduation, fraternities, parades, etc etc.

When soldiers walk through airport arrival gates, people applaud. You didn't have to approve of the consent to understand as an Australian that something else is going on, something you are not only excluded from, but are defined against, the idea of "fuss" and "being a wanker".

Despite the best and worst efforts of various parties, we resist any serious attempt at real celebration of nationhood. Australia Day doesn't exist, and ANZAC day is a bizarre spectacle -- in Turkey it's just a stop on the Kon-tiki tour, in Australia it's some weird ghoul fesitival where people pretend to be their great grandparents by wearing their medals -- and that's it. There ain't nothing else, but the beach.

My own vice is to be a serial nationalist. I loved Britain because I was half-English, but I loved Finland too, and Sweden, after about three months there, their strangeness, their pagan undercurrent, the sense that however civilised they were, the edge of the forest was close, and beyond that, all bets were off.

So it's not difficult to fall in love with America either, because for most of us, it was always there. If you grew up anytime post 60s, you grew up on Scooby Doo and Spiderman, on Mad magazine and Pez sweets, on Grease and roller-disco, on et cetera and et cetera.

I remember going to what I am told was the second McDonalds opened in Australia, in Elsternwick in the mid 70s. Had one ever tasted anything like this before, the cheeseburger that melted on the tongue? It did so because it was 60% sugar, and fell apart on the first hit of saliva, but, hey, it felt like the host, like the body of Christ. It was a sacrament, the incarnation of all those things you'd seen on the recently-coloured TV screen.

So America is always waiting for you. Soon as you get here, the feeling is unheimlich, uncanny. You are more at home than you were at home, you have pretty much stepped into the TV screen and found it real, but that homeliness feels ... unhomely. It was meant to keep its distance, to be forever out of reach, and here it is.

But even more strangely, America does not know America. This is a country built on the audacity of revolution, of radical and bitter conflict, of the idea that there is a necessary violence to social relations which cannot be avoided. That violence is often directed against the weaker -- native Americans, blacks, trade unionists, the Vietnamese -- but America is made and reconstructed when violence or forcefulness is taken up by the weak, when the abstract sentiments of the founding documents are put into play.

Empire came so quickly to America -- with the Louisiana purchase in 1803, an act which was, incidentally, flagrantly unconstitutional -- that its revolutionary nature was buried almost immediately. Yet it was founded not by the second stage revolution of Jefferson and John Adams and others, but by the initial uprisings and agitation in Boston in the 1760s, directed largely by Samuel Adams, a man whom most Americans will know only as the name on a popular -- and disgustingly sweet -- brand of beer.

Adams fomented the American revolution in the 1760s. He made it in fact -- he joined a whole series of local grievances of contradictory groups, from importers to inland farmers, to sailors -- to a common theme of a general revolution, a thing which none of them had hitherto considered. He schemed, he lied, he cheated, he rabble-roused to persuade reasonable people who wanted a normal life, to an unreasonable and violent conclusion. His world historical importance is that he was the first professional revolutionary – he had only one goal, which was the creation of revolution. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.

A devout Christian, he led mobs trying to lynch British soldiers. When the first shots were fired on Lexington green, a confrontation he had largely provoked, he was in hiding, with John Hancock, because the British had a death penalty on his head. He would later organise the sacking of Hancock, a lifelong comrade and friend, because he thought there was a better candidate for leader of the revolutionary army, a bloke named Washington, whose selection he ensured by sleazy politicking in Philadelphia taverns during the constitutional conventions.

Finally he wrote the articles of Confederation, the document of union that preceded the Constitution. The Confederation articles were unworkable, but they were a far more radical and democratic idea of what a nation could be -- that it would be a confederation of united states -- of people governing themselves, with a President of minimal powers, sorting out differences between them.

Sam Adams's articles of Confederation were a post nation-state form, before the nation-state even got going. They were designed to frustrate any drive to empire, making it impossible for the President to be a de facto emperor. Almost immediately it became clear that if America were to be a trading nation -- not what either Sam Adams or even Jefferson particularly wanted -- treaties would need to be signed (with the Ottoman empire initially) and a President would need to have both commercial and military powers, and well, here we frikkin are.

Of all the founding fathers, Sam Adams is forgotten. Every twenty years someone writes a biography of him, trying to restore his place, but it fades away, before the second tier revolutionaries, Jefferson, Washington and that utter charlatan Benjamin Franklin. Of course he is. A revolutionary order, if it wishes to become an empire, must forget its foundation as a series of radical gestures. The weird thing about America is that its founding base is a non-base: those words in the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.

The nub is in the question of legitimacy. How do you determine when it is necessary to dissolve bonds? The deep import of the D of I is anarchistic -- it puts the bias of right towards the revolutionaries, the breaker-uppers. If you're going to keep a country together you need to bury that impulse really deep, have it forgotten.

But you can't ever bury it completely. The more you try to squash it, the more it returns as the repressed. The repression is obvious, it is two million in prison, it is "American exceptionalism" it is "we never surrender" it is etc etc. Its opposite is more elusive.

It returns in dreams of chaos, in Tarantino films, in neighbourhoods the cops won't go, yes in Halloween, or in John Brown and Harpers Ferry, and Bill Ayres and Bernadine Doehrn, and people who come to the conclusion that such great evil is being done in their name that they must risk the death of innocents to stand in its path.

Yes of course the right are right. Barack Obama, though almost certainly a centrist now, was formed in the crucible of the left -- of radical leftist circles in Hawaii, Occidental college in California, of the Harlem and Chicago lefts. Of course he is a transformational person utterly unlike that worthless ... Tony Blair (remember him?).

There is no need to doubt his own record from his autobiography, that he worked through black liberation, Marxism, the New Party etc etc, and ultimately came to a conclusion that corresponds to Anthony Giddens's idea of the radical centre, that things could be done in the heart of it all.

So if for all that he wins, yes, I think this will be a transformation of America, its self, its role in the world, a situation that will be productive. A situation far beyond the greasy trading of political advantage.

For all the hundreds of people, the thousands I have met in America, I hope he wins, for their improved access to healthcare, even those who opposed it as socialism. Their capacity for self-delusion is total. When you tell them of (Oz) medicare, they cannot believe it -- twenty bucks for a GP visit, free blood tests ... they think of its signs and wonders...

Had there been a Republican Congress I would have urged a McCain victory, because that would have got us to a third world war quicker, and that can only be to the good, in revolutionary terms. But a split Congress -- White House admin ... there's no good in it...

I think a unified Presidency and Congress, of Democratic nature, would be the last gasp of the idea that western capitalism can restore itself which of course it can't, but would allow a space for other things to develop. America has ceased to be interesting. China, India, that's interesting. America has ascended to its final status which is as subject matter for a Hopper picture.

I hope I hope I hope that a sufficient number of people have been summoned to the future by Obama's concrete proposals and general approach to vote for a future. But who knows?