July 2008 archive

Want to be free of cars? Neal Peirce writes:

Bikes, overall, account for 37 percent of Amsterdam transport. Public transit comes in second, at 22 percent of trips. On top of regular and high-speed rail, there’s a massive light-rail network — 50 miles of tramlines, with many stops, dense in the center city, radiating out to neighborhoods and suburbs with cross-connecting lines too. Recently, freight tramcars began running through the city, cutting truck use (and pollution). And Amsterdam has added three new subway lines since its first in 1976.

So what’s the Amsterdam game plan? For decades it’s been to nurture the “compact city,” slowing a middle-class exodus and preserving the open landscape by dense development, recycling old industrial areas and intermingling uses. Reducing auto use — now just 41 percent of trips compared to 90 percent-plus in most U.S. cities — is the heart of the plan.

Helped along by the Netherlands’ high gas taxes (per gallon costs are now over $9), the Amsterdam approach not only cuts energy use but provides a starting point for dramatic carbon reduction. But its genius, so rarely discussed in America, is smart land use and curbing the auto use that so easily overwhelms modern world cities.

Cities in the Netherlands like Amsterdam have been busy changing and evolving away from a car transportation system since Jimmy Carter was elected in the United States in 1976. American cities, on the other hand, largely have been pushing for more roads, wider roads, and more cars.

Resulting in, as the International Herald Tribune describes, America’s oil addiction: Chronicle of a crisis foretold.

Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.

Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.

Nearly 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research group that advises Congress.

People in the Netherlands are paying twice as much — $9 a gallon — for gasoline… and have something to show for it. What does America have to show for $4.50 a gallon gasoline?

You gotta love Republican economics.  It flip flops like a fish on a dock.  Is it supply side or is it deficit hawk?  Is it for profligate spending and no taxation?  Will it claim somehow to balance the budget by decreasing taxes?  What kind of crazy voodoo economics is it this time?

An early example of fish thrashing on wood.  When he was trying to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, George H.W. Bush (George Pere) derided Reagan’s supply-side policies as “voodoo economics”. Later he promoted those policies to become the Republican nominee 1988.  Famously pronouncing, “Read my lips, no new taxes”, he ended up eating his words. He imposed tax increases.  He was for tax increases before he was against them and then he was for them again.  Mostly, he was for rich folks’ benefit and winning the election.  That seems a fairly easy idea to fulfill.  Not.

And now you have John McSame who is dancing to the same Republican economics pipers. Today’s New York Times reports that McSame’s economics policy is not very pleasing at all to the rich folks:

As Senator John McCain began a week of economic-themed campaigning here on Monday, it was apparent that some of the underlying tension between the two schools that guide his economic thinking – supply-siders who want to cut taxes and deficit hawks who want to balance the federal budget – remained unresolved.

Mr. McCain is pledging once again to balance the budget by the end of his first term as president in 2013, his advisers said Monday, reverting to an earlier pledge that the Arizona senator had abandoned in April when he proposed a series of costly tax cuts for corporations and high earners, and said it might take two terms to balance the budget.

“American workers and families pay their bills and balance their budgets, and I will demand the same of the government,” Mr. McCain said at a town hall-style meeting here.

But it is unclear how Mr. McCain plans to balance the budget, given that fiscal analysts who have examined his economic plans say his calls to extend the Bush tax cuts while cutting corporate and other taxes would likely increase the deficit significantly.

This tension between steep tax cuts and deficit reduction has been a recurring theme in the evolution of Mr. McCain.

This is not a criticism – it’s a plea.

We are at a time unlike any other in the 250,000-year history of our species.  What we do now will determine the fate of our kind.  We may soon know whether or not we deserve the name we have given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens – wise or knowing human.

This is a title of a Letter to the Editor.  Ah, you say:  Must be from the offspring of some mega church evangelical in a red state, right?  Well, surprisingly enough, it’s not.  It is from a 2008 graduate of Mumford High School, writing the letter to the Detroit Free Press.

“I am not ashamed to admit that the man getting my vote will be a Republican referred to as “the anti-Christ” by my acquaintances…Since the campaign began, most of my friends and family supported Obama just because of the color of his skin — not because of his politics…”

So, this young African-American woman is going to vote for McCain.  What reasons does she give, other than her statement that initially it was a rebellion?  Here are a couple of reasons she gives (emphasis mine):

(More Below the Fold)

cross-posted at Iran thru Open Eyes

Here’s what came over the transom today from Robert Naiman and others at JustForeignPolicy, the gang that, I hope, will kick ass and take names as the Bushcons are ushered out the back door:

Recently we’ve seen an escalation of threats to attack Iran. In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reported that Congressional leaders agreed last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran. (1) The House of Representatives is currently considering a resolution promoted by AIPAC that would effectively demand a blockade against Iran. (2) This resolution has over 200 co-sponsors, although a surge of opposition has prevented it from being passed so far.

Here’s what those promoting military attacks and blockades on Iran don’t want Americans to know: there’s an offer on the table that could resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program and allow both sides to claim victory.

Help us spread the word by watching and forwarding this video, in which former US Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering makes the case for talks with Iran, without pre-conditions, on multilateral uranium enrichment in Iran:

http://www.justforeignpolicy.o…