by Richard B. Simon
The entire purpose of the Tea Party was to cripple this country's move to a new energy economy.
The old powers in oil, coal, and even timber (and note that among the biggest Tea Party funders, the Koch Brothers, profit in most of these old-guard sectors of the economy) underwrote this "grass-roots" movement. Fox News essentially created the Tea Party, using the fiery vitriol of Glen Beck -- whose television program debuted the day after Obama's inauguration -- to peddle a false narrative that portrayed Obama's Presidency as an abomination, an assault by the country's enemies on the heart of the nation's fabric, a virus infecting the country's very goodness and soul (all classic arguments used by rising Fascist regimes to gain popular support).
Obama's presidency was not valid. It was a fraud. Obama was not a citizen. He was not a Christian. He hated America. And was a Marxist, a Communist -- he was every possible worst thing you could be to a jingoistic ignorant from the 20th century, every enemy rolled into one: a Soviet Communist Muslim Nigger. And then, too, Beck crafted Obama every night as the return of Hitler.
And so, it was easy. The Tea Party signs, quite predictably, portrayed Obama as an African witch doctor, as Hitler himself, or with hammers and sickles in his O logo, or as bin Laden -- this, before he killed bin Laden.
(no irony here:)
But why would energy interests bankroll the Tea Party -- a loose band of citizens ostensibly angry about government spending and bailouts of "too big to fail" corporations? After all, the Iraq War was essentially a trillion dollar bailout of an oil industry increasingly unable to find new product.
Sixteen days after Obama's Inauguration, Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions
suggested in an interview that in response to the Democrats' control of the White House and Congress, the GOP should follow the Taliban model of insurgency.
"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."
How did the Taliban -- and the Iraqi insurgency, for that matter -- "disrupt and change a person's entire processes"?
Both insurgent movements did not work to cement actual territorial victories -- instead, they moved to undermine public confidence in a new government's ability to maintain order. The purpose of those violent insurgencies was not to kill people and take territory, but to undermine popular faith in the ability of those in charge -- by sowing as much chaos as possible.
And that is, in fact, what the GOP has done through Obama's entire Presidency.
They have at every turn undermined Obama's attempts to rescue the economy -- and more importantly, to build the next economy.
There could be no more potent symbol than the
House Republican leadership's move, immediately upon taking control of Congress after the 2010 elections, to take composting, compostable bioplastic utensils, and paper cups out of the Congressional cafeteria -- and replace them with good old fashioned petroleum plastic and styrofoam cups. It was largely seen as a poke in the eye to Nancy Pelosi. But really, it was a signal to the old guard that the House GOP would kill the green economy in the cradle.
Everyone knows the next economy is in green-tech and clean-tech. That's why the GOP -- funded by oil and coal interests -- (and some Democrats who represent oil and coal states) have worked to kill it.
The big "scandal" this week is about Solyndra, a California solar manufacturer that was the beneficiary of stimulus loans, in part of Obama's effort to kickstart a green tech economy hindered for forty years by extreme Federal subsidization of oil and coal.
Solyndra failed, at a cost of 500 million dollars of taxpayer funds. That's kind of how investment works -- you win some, you lose some. And ideally, in the end, you come out ahead.
But as
Thomas Friedman notes in the New York Times, Solyndra may not have failed had the U.S. Senate in 2009 not failed to pass a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions. The inability of Congress to act sends a signal to investors in green tech that they will still have to compete against federally-subsidized oil and coal.
There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce "green jobs," and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained private sector investment in, renewables. Without a carbon tax or gasoline tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.
As Friedman correctly notes, the green tech industry has been waiting for a "price signal" -- a signal that the Federal Government would no longer keep the price of dirty fossil fuels artificially low relative to next-generation energy technologies.
But that's the whole point.
In 2000, the energy industries saw two candidates with the potential to take the energy economy in vastly different directions -- the global warming guy or the oil industry guy with a hard-on for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Guess who they bankrolled. And Bush's policies followed suit. The Bush Presidency was a disaster for America, and an unmitigated jackpot for the fossil industries.
With Obama's election, the American people saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the country's course. And the best of that was the chance to move away from the old-fashioned energy policies that keep us chained to (as
Neil Young would say) the oil monster's hook and claw -- to pollution and catastrophic global warming and wars in oil countries.
The energy industries saw the same thing -- so, flush with Bush-era profits, they doubled down on the GOP. They funded the Tea Party movement. As the Guardian (UK)
reported in 2010:
BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.
An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.
The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe's biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: "The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people."
Hell, Koch Industries even bused Tea Partiers to anti-climate protests.
They also
lay at the heart of a "movement" to counter Obama's moves away from that old-world energy economy -- and to frame it as a Communistic assault on Traditional American Freedoms:
The Koch network meets twice a year to plan and expand its efforts - as the letter says, "to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it."
Those efforts, the letter makes clear, include countering "climate change alarmism and the move to socialized health care," as well as "the regulatory assault on energy," and making donations to higher education and philanthropic organizations to advance the Koch agenda.
...
The goals for the twice-yearly meetings, the brochure says, include attracting more investors to the cause, but also building institutions "to identify, educate and mobilize citizens" and "fashioning the message and building the education channels to re-establish widespread belief in the benefits of a free and prosperous society."
Charles Koch, whose wealth Forbes magazine calculates at about $21.5 billion, argues in his letter that "prosperity is under attack by the current administration and many of our elected officials." He repeatedly warns about the "internal assault" and "unrelenting attacks" on freedom and prosperity. A brochure with the invitation underscores that to the Koch network, "freedom" means freedom from taxes and government regulation. Mr. Koch warns of policies that "threaten to erode our economic freedom and transfer vast sums of money to the state."
And by assaults on freedom and prosperity, the Kochs and their ilk mean assaults on the freedom of oil companies and timber companies to consume public resources without cleaning up their wastes, and the prosperity of ... well, themselves.
Among the keynote speakers at the Kochs' event was FOX's own bizarroworld agitator Glenn Beck. Beck, who cemented the Tea Party itself with his
cult-like "9/12 Movement" and won the 2010 election for the GOP, has been moved out of FOX's programming and onto his own network, where he can continue to further the cause without threatening the ruse that FOX is an actual news network, rather than a sophisticated corporate-Republican propaganda outfit aimed at destroying the Obama presidency.
And honestly, when we hear Republicans now bemoaning the government "picking winners and losers", that's the former government-picked winners talking. In other words: Government should not be picking winners and losers, unless the winners is us.
And make no mistake: oil and timber interests are among the resource-hungry industries that benefit the most from federal largesse in the form of subsidies for logging and exploration roads, essentially free use of public forests and lands, and free waste disposal,when the taxpayers clean up the messes they've left behind.
This all feels like repeating old news -- except that this week, the talk has been that Obama's Green Jobs initiative has failed, because it has not, in a mere two years, rescued the economy by generating millions of jobs, becoming 10% of the economy, and thereby erasing unemployment.
Baloney.
Green-tech -- new technologies that move away from toxic petrochemicals and landfills and toward closed-loop waste management -- is the future. Clean energy is the core of the next global economy. Germany knows it, China knows it, Japan knows it, India knows it. The American people have long seen that the future would be a place of solar panels rather than smokestacks.
But the purpose of the modern GOP is to try to prevent the United States form moving forward into the next energy economy. In the long term, of course, they will not succeed -- these are the last dying gasps of the old order.
But the fossil industries' determination to hold onto their dominance of US policy dovetails nicely with the purpose of the Republicans in the Obama Age -- which is, according to the top Republican in the Senate, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- of the coal state, Kentucky, to destroy Obama's presidency. Here's
McConnell in October 2010:
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
They're doing a good job of it. Everywhere the republicans could throw chains around the President's neck and bind his wrists -- the health care law, the economic recovery, the stimulus package, the debt ceiling "crisis" -- they have, and have so hindered the nation.
The other side of that coin is that everywhere the President can operate without GOP meddling -- drawing down the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing bin Laden and dismantling al Qaeda, managing the Arab Spring, ousting longtime US foe Moammar Qaddafi, rescuing the auto manufacturers, raising CAFE fuel economy standards, and thereby creating an electric car industry that manufactures in the United States -- he has succeeded.
And now that we have a burgeoning green car industry, here comes the GOP to try to kill it, all in the name of continuing to feed the impression, among both conservatives convinced that Obama is an African-born/Muslim/Nazi/Stalinist/the Antichrist, and among liberals/progressives who now consider Obama to be, in the words of two women friends of mine this week, "a pussy", that Obama is incapable of leading.
This time, the tactic is
to kill off Federal loans that are actually working to bring green car manufacturing jobs in the former rust belt, to use to pay for disaster relief from the global warming-exacerbated Hurricane Irene, and from the East Coast earthquake -- in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's home district -- in other words, to sink that money into one-time cleanup and rebuilding efforts, instead of using it to invest in the future.
Essentially the Republicans, led this time by Cantor himself, are insisting we take away a man's fishing rod, and give him a fish sandwich for lunch. That was once the opposite of a "conservative" philosophy. No more:
House Republicans rolled out their plan to fund disaster relief in Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-Va.) district, but at the cost of almost half of remaining loans set aside to help the American auto industry ...
The loans for the auto industry were meant to help encourage new manufacturing plants in the U.S. and re-equip existing facilities, as well as drive the companies toward making more fuel-efficient vehicles ...
One of the direct results was that Ford quit manufacturing their Ford Focus in Mexico.
"All of the Focus production is now here in Michigan," Hill said. "Nissan is building their Leaf in Tennessee. I don't think that program would've happened in the United States if it weren't for this type of money."
For the insurgents, it's a win-win scenario. The fossil industries get the brakes put on the move away from their product. The GOP wins by killing jobs -- and thereby bolstering the impression that Obama is failing to aid the economy.
Sure, Americans will lose their jobs, and the nation will be crippled in its move toward the economy of the future. But Republicans care as much about such collateral damage as the Taliban cares about the lives of innocent Afghans killed in suicide attacks. In fact, collateral damage is the whole point. Because people will pin the deaths not only on the insurgents, but on the government's failure to protect them from the insurgents.
This is the Taliban Insurgency strategy, applied inside the United States.
Taken in perspective, the entire purpose of the Tea Party is to strangle the United States' move into the next energy economy, the Age of Clean, Green Industry.
The purpose of the GOP is to sow chaos, to undermine confidence in Obama's ability to lead.
And, on both counts, they are succeeding.
By handing the House to the GOP, the Tea Party killed the green economic recovery -- at least in the short term. And that looks bad for Obama. At least on the surface.
The bottom line is this:
The American people need to keep things in perspective.
Again, everywhere Obama has been able to act without GOP interference, he has done quite well -- bin Laden, Libya, saving the automakers, raising CAFE standards, drawing down in Iraq and Afghanistan, managing the Arab Spring.
Everywhere it appears that Obama is doing poorly is where the GOP has moved to kill him with their Taliban Insurgency strategy.
Many Americans are losing faith in Obama and considering sitting on their hands in 2012. This is just like the Afghans who refuse to aid U.S. forces in digging out al Qaeda, because they are demoralized by the decade of violence under U.S. occupation. Essentially, they will be handing a victory to the Taliban.
Voters who support or once supported Obama need to buck up -- and, frankly, give Democrats control of the White House and both houses of Congress -- with a filibuster-proof majority.
As Jonathan Chait
explains in the New York Times, Obama had this for only four months of his presidency. And for the rest of the time, the Insurgency has filibustered nearly every bill; blocked nearly every nominee; and gummed up the works in every single way they possibly could.
The insurgency must be destroyed. The insurgents must be removed from office.
As for Obama:
He's trying to do two things at once: to change the tenor of a Washington that acts only for partisan advantage, and to actually move the country forward against the will of partisan insurgents.
And really, he's trying to do the same thing at home as he is doing on some level in Afghanistan, which is to negotiate with the Taliban. But, you know, when you try to compromise with the mob that's trying to string you from the nearest tree, you end up holding the rope for them.
Obama needs to follow the vaunted General Petraeus and wage an effective counterinsurgency at home.
This will mean fomenting the equivalent of the Sunni Awakening -- prying moderate Republicans, if any remain, off of their caucus -- by hook or crook, with both carrot and stick -- and doing the same with voters.
This also means doing the equivalent of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan: targeting individual GOP legislators and effectively destroying them politically. For example, relentlessly running ads in their home districts that portray their party line votes as destroying new jobs. Obama seems to be doing a bit of this, visiting the districts of House GOP leaders in recent weeks to address rallies.
Obama also needs to win the information war, which would mean, basically, hiring the linguist
George Lakoff, to help shape the message so that it is both honest and effective.
Ultimately, we were moving in the right direction until the GOP took control of Congress in 2010. Most Americans know they are the albatross around Obama's neck; they want to see Obama throw them off -- that's why Obama's approval rating is low. It's not because Americans don't want to move forward into the next energy economy, or don't want to draw troops out of Iraq or Afghanistan, or don't want most people to have access health care.
Despite FOX "News"' best attempts to convince you otherwise, Obama is not an ideological player. He is a pragmatist. He can't be understood in terms of Baby Boomer era framing. He's not of the generation that had a campus love affair with Communism or joined the right in response to perceived campus shenanigans. In 1968, he was seven years old. Really, Obama is not a liberal or a conservative. He tracks the way journalists track: liberal on social issues, conservative on fiscal issues. Pragmatically hawkish or dovish in foreign policy depending on the situation. As Friedman and Maureen Dowd both recently figured out, Obama is at heart an Independent.
Don't be shocked when Obama embraces Republican fiscal policies. Every 20th century program cut creates opportunity for a 21st century initiative. Every dollar of spending by past Presidents and Congresses cut by the insurgents' battle-axe creates a space in which the next economy can be built. There is some jiu-jitsu in here, after all.
But at this point, to move forward means to decapitate the GOP, to destroy its leadership, to demoralize its ground troops, and turn popular opinion against their destructive insurgency. To tie them to the fossil barons that control them. And to undermine their propaganda.
The GOP spent ten years destroying the American economy, letting our infrastructure collapse, and encouraging corporations to ship American jobs overseas. They spent trillions of dollars to try to enshrine the oil industry's stranglehold on how Americans power their lives. The American people hired Obama to repair the damage, and finally move the country into the 21st century. The GOP -- just like Saddam's Baath Party or the Taliban -- went into Insurgency mode.
The GOP Insurgency is intended to destroy jobs and cripple the United States' ability to compete in the global economy. The fossil industries support it in order to prevent the birth of the next energy economy. The Tea Party are patriots, co-opted. A movement born apparently to rail against government spending to rescue failing corporations, turned to pawns defending the fattest welfare queens of them all: oil companies.
The goal of the GOP insurgency, just like that of the Taliban, or of Saddam's Baath Party, is to destroy Obama's Presidency, to subvert the will of the American people, and retake power.
They want to make us feel bad about our country, and our future -- so that, demoralized, we fail to stop them.
