Tag: Midnight Oil

This is excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy, on the Burning the Midnight Oil blog hosted by the Daily Kos (thought to the best of my knowledge with neither the advise nor consent of kos).

In tonight’s thought, I continue thinking on the coalition change strategy, and in particular on how to expand the base of the coalition. The focus is on one particular dimension of building the coalition that is close to my heart, after my experience in working on this essential dimension of a green transport policy fight.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence, in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog on the Daily Kos.

Looking ahead … say, two decades ahead, to 2030 … where could we be in terms of a sustainable energy system?

We could, of course, have large scale wind farms scattered across the Dakotas, parts of Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, parts of Texas, Illinois through to western Ohio, through the western parts of California, Oregon, Washington, and the list goes on.

We could have large scale concentrated solar power farms scattered across the Southwest, ranging from Texas to California.

We could have large scale ocean and/or tidal power, as well as offshore windpower, off all three coasts as well as windpower all across Lake Erie and in the shallower portions of the other Great Lakes and Lake Champlain.

From Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy, keeping the fire lit at the Big Orange

The core of the progressive populist coalition change strategy is the Blue-Green coalition. That must be the core, for many reasons, some of which I’ve mentioned, and some of which, good lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll get to.

However, while that is a necessary part of the coalition change strategy, it is by no means sufficient. A coalition change strategy must be broad based. Working in the interest of the coalition must be a dominant political strategy, with the extra time and trouble of working out differences with coalition partners clearly worth the trouble.

And that means that everyone in the coalition must see the benefits of being part of the group … and that means that the coalition is far more robust if it has more than two main members.

And now I run into a tremendous problem, which is that the radical right reactionaries that captured the Republican Party have so soiled and muddled the public discourse that I have no name I can come up with for the third member of the progressive populist coalition strategy for change.

However, lacking a name that names the member of the coalition, we make do, and have been since before I wandered along and noticed what was happening.

This is the Burning the Midnight Oil Midnight Thought for tonight … which will be found in Burning the Midnight Oil for Sensible Economics … but not until later tonight (Wednesday).

Posted here because … well, Docudharma blogs the future. Yeah, normally further ahead in the future than three or four hours, but if I didn’t already have this part in the draft diary queue, ready to go, I’d have no idea what I was going to say.

And, yes, the two most important parts of the Midnight Oil are, first, the commentary that follows and, second, the diary roll, so what I’m giving you here is a Bronze Medal … that is, the Midnight Oil clip and snippet from the lyrics. And then, of course, the Midnight Thought which finishes, as they say in Oz, “just outside the medals”.

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Midnight Thought

The time has come to talk about … Inflation.

Oh, c’mon, wake up! You, there in the back, I see you dropping off to sleep. Yeah, its late for some of your, get a cup of coffee or tea or something. This is serious. Start talking about economics and people just {mutter mutter mutter}

Is there any question that we are facing a threat of inflation? No, of course not.

The question is, which inflation are we facing?

This is the Burning the Midnight Oil Midnight Thought for tonight … which will be found in Burning the Midnight Oil for Electoral Reform … but not until later tonight (Monday).

Posted here because … well, Docudharma blogs the future. Yeah, normally further ahead in the future than three or four hours, but if I didn’t already have this part in the draft diary queue, ready to go, I’d have no idea what I was going to say.

And, yes, the two most important parts of the Midnight Oil are, first, the commentary that follows and, second, the diary roll, so what I’m giving you here is a Bronze Medal at best … but thems the hazards. I haven’t finished the diary roll yet, because I am still reading diaries, and I have no idea what direction the commentary is going to take. Third Place is the only part of the future I can see with any clarity.

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Midnight Thought

Is the present mess any worse than a National Primary, dominated by 30 second sound byte ads and providing a revenue windfall to television networks, both broadcast and narrowcast, and raising the hurdle for a grass roots popular campaign even higher than they are now?

Well, heck, I don’t know. The present mess is pretty bad but … all in all, given the example that jumping up to the first Tuesday open date on the calendar does not, in fact, make you decisive, and given the example that breaking the rules agreed to by the state parties working together under the auspices of the National Democratic Committee is not the high road to massive influence …

… it seems like we – we, here, means both the body politic in general and progressive populists in particular – would really would end up better off running the the next Open Primary under the current mess than as a National Primary.

So, no, I don’t think that the present mess would be improved by a Mess Media Dominated National Primary (and I am not copyrighting that phrase … I’m releasing it into the Public Domain, so feel free to use it anywhere and everywhere without bothering with attribution … but do attribute it if you are running for President and making a speech … you don’t want to pull a Biden, after all).

But, just because a Mess Media Dominated National Primary is teh suck, doesn’t mean the present mess is the best we can do. Oh, no, there’s plenty we could do better.

And fighting for electoral improvement is, after all, an old Progressive Populist fight.