Mr. Bush surprised me yesterday. Usually that’s really bad news, but this time I have to admit that I liked what he did. With a stroke of his pen he acquiesced to the suggestions of his Secretaries of State and Defense by ordering the destruction of most of our stock of nuclear weapons to achieve an inventory of about one-quarter the size of our stock at the end of the cold war. That still leaves us with 1,200 or so on hand, so it isn’t as if the world is free of the threat, but at least the explosive, radioactive power lying around will be reduced significantly.
All the hawks out there needn’t worry, though. W hasn’t gone dovish. He’s just recognizing that there is little value in carrying an obsolete inventory of nuclear weaponry into the 21st century, and the other shoe may well come in the form of his recommendation for replacing those old warheads.
His signature of the new energy conservation bill was a mild surprise, too. I think it’s just that it has finally dawned on him that his term will end soon and there will be a legacy for people to point at. He’d rather they were neither laughing nor crying at the time. He wants to be remembered for more than his obstinacy and hawkishness. After all, being the “war president” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement in a country that is ostensibly a peace loving nation.
No matter what he does, though, he will not be remembered as anything but the worst president in American history. Not that the energy bill is any great prize, either.
The Demorats can crow all they want to about getting it passed, but this bill’s only real achievement is the establishment of fuel efficiency standards for the auto industry that should have been met under Jimmy Carter’s leadership if Congress had paid him any attention. They also crow about the “alternative fuels” clauses, but their upshot is that we all get to subsidize the nonsensical ethanol industry to the tune of about fifty cents a gallon so that the corn farmers will continue to vote Repulsican. In the meantime, our food costs rise because corn is now in our tanks instead of our flakes, farmers continue to pour petroleum products from gas to fertilizer into mono-crop farming methods that deplete the soil horribly but earn the farmers more for their subsidized corn than they could get by treating their soil with some stewardship, and the citizenry keeps on gassing up their SUVs and driving as much as we did when gas was 25 cents a gallon.
If we had to have an ethanol program, we could have had a bill that authorized growth of crops more sensibly appropriate for ethanol production – hemp for example – and mandated good land management practices like crop rotation in return for subsidies.
But the biggest problem with this legislation is that the Demorats caved in to the Bush veto threats by removing funding for alternative fuel and power generation research programs. That leaves us with no approach that is not dependent upon the existing corporate power structure – big oil and big energy – to dictate the level of potential we have for alleviating the pressure we continue to put on our limited resources and the limited capacity of the earth to absorb our profligacy.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that we humans have a devastating impact on our environment, but it will apparently take a rocket to get it through Washington’s head that we can’t forever to continue to crap in our nest without ultimately destroying our own ability to live in it.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi
Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR
The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle
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