Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence
It is by now old news that Florida's Governor Scott sided with the TexasTea Party position on the Florida HSR corridor over the economic interests of central Florida is beginning to establish an oil independent means for tourists to make their way to Orlando/Tampa tourist locations ~ with DisneyWorld as the flagship location but only one of many parts of the tourist sector that plays such an important role in Central Florida.
And this is the question: when the argument is not about how to develop the economy, but whether it is more important to develop the economy or prop up the bottom line of the large pack of yellow bellied surplus suckers ~ with Big Oil right near the front of the pack ~ how do we fight back against the economic parasites and try to win a future for the US Economy?
A Note On Terminology: The TexasTea Party
Its about the oil. While the Koch brothers and their fellow travelers among the hard right wing oil money were certainly sincere in wanting to derail health care reform, the other goal that was advanced by the exact same actions was to delay the roll out of the Administration agenda and ensure that the White House would get to the Energy Bill so late in the 111th Congress with such political capital already expended that the Energy Bill would not make it through.
Since the bottom line of Big Oil and the Economic Freedom of the United States are diametrically opposed, the US portion of Big Oil is placed into the natural position of aggressive Traitors to the fundamental economic security ~ and, indeed, national security ~ of the United States.
And of course the hard right wing ideologues among Oil Money billionaires and millionaires are leading the charge, because they are most firmly convinced of a model of the world in which Economic Servitude to foreign interests is, actually, in the fundamental interests of the United States. Rather than attempting to throw off the chains of backward looking technology and institutions that hold us in bondage, we are supposed to celebrate our chains and earnestly ask for more chains to be put in place.
The members of the TexasTea Parties do not, of course, look at it this way. However, the people who put the TexasTea Parties together invested in effective, focus-group tested, propagandists to determine what story line would be effective in forming the TexasTea party, so what the members of the TexasTea Parties think is a combination of their long standing convictions overlaid with the lowest resistance line to the conclusions that it is necessary that they arrive at to serve the needs of Big Oil.
Indeed, forming the TexasTea Parties served a double role of preventing a populist uprising against Big Oil as well as pulling the leash on a Republican Party establishment that seemed to be too willing to put their own political interests in giving the appearance of using their positions to solve problems people faced ahead of the profitability of oil companies.
Now, the propagandists doing this work are certainly happy to sell their skills to whichever corporation needs them, so of course, coming from the Health Care fight, the same skillset and strategy is available to all the other members of the pack of yellow bellied surplus suckers. Should there be a threat of policy in support of the future existence of the US Economy that would undermine the short term interests of any member of the pack of yellow bellied surplus suckers, that will get tossed into the pool of primary threats facing any member of the Republican Party establishment who does not toe the line.
But the US is still producing about 1/10th of the world supply of oil, and so Big Oil is one of the biggest pots of money out there for investing in the TexasTea Parties. And unlike some of the other members of the pack of yellow-bellied surplus suckers ~ private insurance companies, the Prison Industrial Complex ~ Big Oil has been a big money influence in US politics for a long time, so they are further along the learning curve than the others.
So I may be a crowd of 1, but I have and will continue to call them the TexasTea Parties. They are first and foremost tools of Big Oil, and the very first step in pushing back against the strategy is calling them tools of Big Oil.
The Existential Conflict between Big Oil and Having A National US Economy
There is another dimension to the issue, which is which fights are fights of the moment where, if the politics shake out slightly different, the adversary of today becomes the ally of tomorrow. And which fights are fundamental to the fundamental point at issue, and where the dispute is a defining fault line of the political landscape.
While we need to find ways to provide more effective health care for a smaller share of our economy, and need to find ways to scale back our prison system to the size appropriate to a high income, modern society ... the conflict between the long term survival of the US economy and the health care sector as a whole, or the Prison Industrial complex as a whole, is not an existential conflict. The same, indeed, goes for Wall Street: while putting Wall Street in the drivers seat proved catastrophic for the economy, and will always be a catastrophic mistake, there still are useful roles for a much smaller Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector to play.
For Big Oil, this is an existential conflict. Either we pursue the establishment of an oil-independent national economy, or we stop having a national economy, and fall back to a series of only loosely connected regional economies. And even if we continue producing some oil as long as we continue to have oil to produce ~ an economy that is not dependent on oil is one in which oil producers can no longer hold the economy hostage to their narrow sectoral interests.
As far as power politics goes, an Oil Freedom Economy implies the breaking of the political power of Big Oil. And it is therefore intrinsic to power politics that a policy that implies the breaking of the political power of a major power center will only be put into place over the determined opposition of that power center.
So Why is High Speed Rail a TexasTea Party Cause Celebre?
Obviously much of the Energy Bill involved a direct attack on our national economy's dangerous addiction to petroleum. It was not an all-out assault on the addiction ~ but much of it would have to be seen by anyone profiting from our national addiction as laying the foundation for an all-out assault to come.
But ... why has Big Oil invested in undercutting High Speed Rail? As documented in Sunday Train: Ed Morris Duped by Libertarian HSR Hackery, 23 August, among others, the so-called "Libertarian" think tanks have a clear objective to arrive at the conclusion that HSR should not be pursued.
But why? If thinking about a full-on assault on oil addiction, think about Steel Interstate would be for long haul freight, or a $1t program for building local electric rail. It targets a specific type of intercity transport, of 100 miles to 500 miles ~ and under current conditions, many passengers would drive to the station and many passengers would take the train to complete a longer trip by air. It does not seem to be an all-out assault kind of system.
But when considering some of the reasons that HSR is strategic, they imply that halting HSR is equally strategic. First, HSR offers many benefits to outer suburban and rural areas that it runs through. As pointed out by Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic, this is precisely where the electoral base of the Republican coalition is focused.
It is important to prevent these Republican voters from experiencing the benefits that they will receive if an HSR system is established, because if they experience these benefits, support for HSR will threaten to become too broadly based to roll back.
Indeed, one of the reasons for pursuing HSR at this point in time is because an HSR system on a well chosen corridor will not require an operating subsidy once service is fully established ~ which is to say, within five years. As progressive economic policy, this is important because it will not contest for the artificially limited subsidies for oil-independent local transport. However, politically it is important because if it does not require an operating subsidy, then makes it far less vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that are normally successful against local transit services.
And finally, HSR stations can serve as the patronage anchors for pushing local transit services into areas presently outside the margin of effective service, and for improving the finances and quality of service of those just within the margin of effective service. And of course, the further effective transit services can be pushed into the base Republican population densities, the more opportunities there will be to wedge Republicans on support for oil independent transit.
Fighting Back In Florida
The likelihood is that TexasTea Party Governor Scott in Florida will succeed in postponing the Florida HSR corridor. So, the question is, how to press the fight forward from here.
One thing to avoid is getting bogged down in alignment fights. The ultimate Florida system will run from Miami to Jacksonville and from Orlando to Tampa. The argument that Orlando to Tampa is somehow a "fatally flawed" alignment is nonsense. Certainly the Orlando line does not run through "downtow"n Orlando, but the Sunrail corridor does, and as a North / South local rail corridor where the HSR is an East/West corridor, simple plane geometry ensures that they will cross somewhere. A platform transfer station ensures that the HSR is "one station away" from all of "downtown" Orlando as well as "one station away" from northern and southern suburbs. And any "fatal flaw" that can be fixed with an improvement as a platform transfer station where one rail line passes over another one is, evidently, no fatal flaw.
Although there is, obviously, Heritage propaganda to the contrary, if Florida wishes to start with Orlando / Tampa, that's fine. We want to build a wedge for the political establishment in service to Big Oil, not a wedge for opponents to our national economic addiction to Big Oil.
A second thing is to attack the TexasTea Party directly on national security and local economic loyalty. Central Florida is an economy with heavy investment in out of state tourism. Ensuring that people can continue to come from out of state in the face of the decades of oil price shocks that we are facing is even more important to Central Florida than to many other areas, and those who stand in the way of that are disloyal bastards who want to see the local economy decline.
They are also, of course, traitors to the national economic security. The number one national economic security risk that we face is our addiction to petroleum, Being the lapdogs of Big Oil is far worse than any Glen Beck conspiracy theory, since Big Oil acts every day in direct opposed to the continuing Economic Freedom of the United States.
But its not enough to think it, or to say it in the relative safety of the centrist or center-left blogosphere. Its necessary to call them traitors and lapdogs of Big Oil in public, loudly and often. If they protest the chair, call on them to prove it.
Of course, this is a quite noisy and radical charge to be making, so getting it into regular political contests calls for an inside-outside political strategy. The attack on the TexasTea Party tools of Big Oil as tools of Big Oil calls for a sufficiently rabble rousing progressive populist movement to make the attack.
At the same time, the calm, technocratic, corporatist arguments that HSR is just another mode of transport and a mode of transport that is of particular use to Disney and the other major tourist sector destinations in Central Florida is something to be pursued as an attack not just from less rabble rousing Democrats, but also in the Republican primaries themselves ~ though obviously the way to provoke that challenge is for the more centrist Democrats to go cap in hand to Disney and their ilk and press the case for pressing ahead with HSR.
One immediate target are those State Senators that refused to sign the letter objecting to the abandonment of the HSR project. Even though some of those signatories are unlikely to press the issue with enough conviction to win the fight ~ those who did not sign are the clear opponent. And those running in 2012 will be running in an electoral climate unlikely to be the same as in 2010.
None of these systems will be built in a day. And every one that is built is a permanent victory that will not be reversed. So while every loss to these opponents of a future for a National Economy for the United States is painful, the fact that they are able to get some of them postponed for four or eight years is no catastrophe.
The thing to do is to dust ourselves off, and start all over again.
Midnight Oil ~ Bedlam Bridge