Why Governor LePage Can’t Erase History, and Why We Need a Fighter in the White House

Robert Reich

Why Governor LePage Can’t Erase History, and Why We Need a Fighter in the White House

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.


Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Maine Governor Paul LePage has ordered state workers to remove from the state labor department a 36-foot mural depicting the state’s labor history. Among other things the mural illustrates the 1937 shoe mill strike in Auburn and Lewiston. It also features the iconic “Rosie the Riveter,” who in real life worked at the Bath Iron Works. One panel shows my predecessor at the U.S. Department of Labor, Frances Perkins, who was buried in Newcastle, Maine.

The LePage Administration is also renaming conference rooms that had carried the names of historic leaders of American labor, as well as former Secretary Perkins.

The Governor’s spokesman explains that the mural and the conference-room names were “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.”

Are we still in America?

Frances Perkins was the first woman cabinet member in American history. She was also one of the most accomplished cabinet members in history.

She and her boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to office at a time when average working people needed help – and Perkins and Roosevelt were determined to give it to them. Together, they created Social Security, unemployment insurance, the right of workers to unionize, the minimum wage, and the forty-hour workweek.

Big business and Wall Street thought Perkins and Roosevelt were not in keeping with pro-business goals. So they and their Republican puppets in Congress and in the states retaliated with a political assault on the New Deal.

Roosevelt did not flinch. In a speech in October 1936 he condemned “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”

Big business and Wall Street, he said,

had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.

Fast forward 75 years.

Big business and Wall Street have emerged from the Great Recession with their pockets bulging. Profits and bonuses are as high as they were before the downturn. And they’re spending like mad on lobbying and politics. After the Supreme Court’s disgraceful Citizens United decision, there are no limits.

Pro-business goals are breaking out all over. Governors across America are slashing corporate taxes as they slash state budgets. House and Senate Republicans are intent on deregulating, privatizing, and cutting spending and taxes so their corporate and Wall Street patrons will do even better.

But most Americans are still in desperate trouble. Few if any of the economic gains are trickling down.

That’s why the current Republican assault on workers – on their right to form unions, on unemployment insurance and Social Security, on public employees, and even (courtesy of Governor LePage) on our common memory – is so despicable.

And it’s why we need a President who will fight for workers and fight against this assault — just as Perkins and FDR did.

By the way, Maine’s Governor LePage may be curious to know that the building housing the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington is named the “Frances Perkins Building.” He can find her portrait hanging prominently inside. Also portraits and murals of great leaders of American labor.

A short walk across the mall will bring Governor LePage to an imposing memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, should the Governor wish to visit.

Governor, you might be able to erase some of Maine’s memory, but you’ll have a hard time erasing the nation’s memory – even if it’s not in keeping with your pro-business goals.

Libya Reminds Us No One in Washington Really Cares About Deficits

FDL


Libya Reminds Us Almost No One in Washington Cares About Deficits

By: Jon Walker Tuesday March 22, 2011 10:15 am

The Hill is reporting that the cost of our latest war military action in Libya could effectively wipe out all the deficit reduction House Republicans are trying to squeeze of out of cuts to domestic programs.

U.S. military operations in Libya could wipe out a significant chunk of the budget cuts won by congressional Republicans in recent weeks, defense analysts say.

GOP leaders have trumpeted enacted spending reductions that amount to more than $285 million per day since the beginning of March.

But defense analysts say the Pentagon could be burning through more than $100 million per day in Libya, putting those budget savings at risk.

If we are actually so “broke”–as the deficit hawks like to claim–that we can no longer afford to give heating assistance to poor Americans in the winter or fund immunizations, there would be no way we could afford another conflict that isn’t vital to American security. Nor would we be able to afford the highly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost almost three times as much as all the cuts sought by House Republicans.

Yet there has been no massive uproar from many of the self-styled Republican and Democratic deficit hawks about ending either conflict where we are literally blowing up millions of dollars a day in some of the most wasteful spending imaginable. As if by magic all concerns about the deficit disappear when money is needed for more war. Just like all the scary deficit rhetoric vanishes when it comes time for more tax cuts.

Libya is just another recent reminder that almost no one in Washington actually cares about the deficit. The deficit is only used as an excuse to justify forcing regular Americans to sacrifice.

A World In Deep Denial About Reality

March 21, 2011 at 20:42:29

Beyond Fukishima: A World in Denial About Nuclear Risks

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly,
in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O' Connor
and Richard Bell coined the term "Nuke Speak" to describe the Orwellian methods
deployed by the nuclear industry's PR offensive in a book length analysis of a
well-funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.

What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the "dawn" of the nuclear age?

Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.

"It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world."

The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.

As Hiroshima becomes yesterday's distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies don't want to alarm the public.

Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimized, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticizing Japan for a lack of transparency.

On August, 6, 2008, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimizing public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:

"But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the "mainstream" media and the "alternative." Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report"

Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call "50 years of denial."

One reviewer explained, "The authors examine what they perceive to be a conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about the actual bombing, Truman's decision to drop the bomb, and the birth and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating psychological effects of the bomb."

Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half century.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O' Connor and Richard Bell coined the term "Nuke Speak" to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry's PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.

And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out, President Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear plants.

Others stress more parochial concerns. The TV Production community fears a shortage in Japanese made magnetic and recording tape. Consumers are being told that they may face a delay in ordering new iPads so get your orders in now. And, the Israeli new service YNET says people there worry about a sushi shortage.

Meanwhile, in Germany, more than 50,000 activists took to the streets in protest, but, so far, there has been no organized outcry here in the U.S. At the Left Forum in New York, the issue was barely addressed in the opening plenary.

On the right, flamboyant talking head/provocateur Ann Coulter defended the imagined health benefits of a release of radiation to counter what she calls the alarmism of the environmentalists. She calls it a "cancer vaccine."

In a talk during a recent visit to Iran, which insists it is not making nuclear weapons, I raised questions about what their government said they want to do: expand their nuclear power plants. When I questioned the wisdom of that approach, I was jeered because they felt I was challenging their "right" to have what other countries have, their right to "progress." The thought that the plants could be dangerous was dismissed.

What they don't seem to know and what millions in Japan are finding out is this technology--with spent rods that are never "spent" and the nuclear waste that will outlive us all-- is inherently unsafe. Jonathan Schell makes this point well in a recent essay in The Nation:

"The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind.

The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong--and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch."

As the "incident" records of our own Nuclear Regulatory Agency make clear, these are not just Japanese problems. The Christian Science Monitor reports, "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to resolve known safety problems, leading to 14 'near-misses' in US nuclear power plants in 2009 and 2010, according to a new report from a nuclear watchdog group."

We don't even know the full of the extent of the accidents, unintentional releases of radiation and other problems in this country much less in others with fewer rules and less oversight. No one expected Chenobyl to explode, claiming so many lives; no one knows where the next disaster will occur.

Bernie Sanders is calling for a full investigation of nuclear safety here. Ralph Nader writes, "The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States - many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis."

The global nuclear roulette game goes on. Even moderate and restrained criticisms are dismissed until there is an "event" that cannot be denied. Nuclear energy supporters promise that "Gen 4," the next generation of reactors, will be much safer.

Problem solved? Not everyone thinks so. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists carries an assessment by Hugh Gusterson on "The Lessons of Fukishima."

"To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.

"This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents."

We are still debating if nuclear power is worth the risk as irradiated clouds float over Los Angeles and there is a panicked run in the public to buy iodine pills. The industry's marketing machine is in crisis response mode and hasn't missed a beat, while many of us look on with a sense of impotence as we are told, once again, what's in our best interest.

News Dissector Danny Schechter is blogger in chief at Mediachannel.Org He is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books) available at Amazon.com. See (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Renewable Innovation Easier Without Big Money Shifting to Nuclear

firedoglake

Renewable Innovation Easier Without Big Money Shifting to Nuclear

By: David Dayen Sunday March 20, 2011 11:23 am

Speaking about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and the role of nuclear power generally, Michael Chertoff (I didn’t do the booking, so I don’t know either) told Christiane Amanpour on ABC that “At the end of the day, if we don’t use coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear, we’re going to be sitting around the fire trying to warm ourselves like we did eons ago.”

Once again, we have a public official ignoring renewables completely. To his credit, Bill Richardson did mention renewables (lumping in natural gas with that). But in general, this is how we’ve seen the debate play out in America – you either can burn coal, drill for oil, or build nuclear plants. There is no alternative.

If pressed on this, typically the response is something about the cost-prohibitive nature of renewables, although you have to ignore the cost of cleanups and environmental degradation and the cost in human lives to make that case. But you also hear that renewables are good, but they can’t carry the load alone, and that nuclear must be part of that overall mix. But David Roberts finds a new study which argues that, actually, we may have to choose between nuclear and renewables:

Here, in helpfully condensed form, are the four principal arguments:

1. Competition for limited investment funds. A euro, dollar or yuan can only be spent once and it should be spent for the options that provide the largest emission reductions the fastest. Nuclear power is not only one of the most expensive but also the slowest option.
2. Overcapacity kills efficiency incentives. Centralized, large power-generation units tend to lead to structural overcapacities. Overcapacities leave no room for efficiency.
3. Flexible complementary capacity needed. Increasing levels of renewable electricity sources will need flexible, medium-load complementary facilities and not inflexible, large, baseload power plants.
4. Future grids go both ways. Smart metering, smart appliances and smart grids are on their way. The logic is an entirely redesigned system where the user gets also a generation and storage function. This is radically different from the top-down centralized approach.

Roberts adds that distributed innovation in the renewable sphere would wind up generating more electricity in the long run than the long, slow process of building static, stationary nuclear plants. Once you dedicate resources – and you’d have to dedicate a lot – to nuclear, you sap capital away from greentech that is needed to further that innovation.

Roberts isn’t totally convinced that the dichotomy is this stark. But I think we can say that, once the rhetoric leaves renewables out of the conversation, it will be impossible to bring them back into it. Nuclear plants are very large power generators and they eat up a lot of public and private dollars. The commitment there would not be easily reversed. And in the wake of Fukushima Daiichi, we have to think hard about that commitment.

“Whichever way the wind blows” – Update Fukushima I Nuclear Disaster

The Money Party

We Are Nothing To Them

“Whichever way the wind blows” – Update Fukushima I Nuclear Disaster

By Michael Collins

An update of Post Nuclear Japan, Pre Disaster United States

Stormsurf.com (See the latest forecast)

The world is about to be shoved through the looking glass, head first.

New York Times: Japan Faces Potential Nuclear Disaster as Radiation Levels Rise

TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to the statements of Japanese government and industry officials. New York Times, March 15

The two critical questions over the next day or so are how much radioactive material is spewed into the atmosphere, and where the winds carry it.

“We are on the brink. We are now facing the worst-case scenario,” said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. “We can assume that the containment vessel at Reactor No. 2 is already breached. If there is heavy melting inside the reactor, large amounts of radiation will most definitely be released.” New York Times, March 15 (approximately 2:15 ET)

The explosion recalls the Washington Post article of March 13. The meldown occurring, according to the New York Times report, is appalling. If the wind shifts direction, 103 million people are at risk on Japan’s main island Honshu:

If a full meltdown occurs, a huge molten lump of radioactive material would burn through all containment, destroy the building and fall to the ground, exposed. A toxic stew of exotic radioactive particles would then spread on the wind and rain.

But if luck turns south and the winds do, too, radioactive particles could be spread far across Honshu, Japan’s largest island, [103 million population] and beyond. Washington Post, March 13

Russia TV presented a video of the explosion:

Video of blast at Fukushima nuke plant, radiation leak reported

“Who’s on Third?” Information Cluster…. at the UN and IAEA

Reuters ran a story on March 13 dismissing the health risks of radiation. Malcom Crick, Secretary of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, was cited as an authority:

“This is not a serious public health issue at the moment,” Malcolm Crick, Secretary of the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, told Reuters.

“It won’t be anything like Chernobyl. There the reactor was operating at full power when it exploded and it had no containment,” he said. As a precaution, around 140,000 people have been evacuated from the area around Fukushima.

Reuters tracked down the director general of the International Automic Energency Agency (IAEA), former Japanese diplomat. His comments came as the Times reported the current conditions “verging” on nuclear disaster:

Japan nuclear crisis unlike Chernobyl – U.N. atom chief
Reuters March 15, 2011, 5:18 am

Vienna (Reuters) Yukiya Amano, director general of the … IAEA expressed confidence Japanese authorities were doing all they could to restore safety at the sites and said a Chernobyl-style disaster was “very unlikely.”

“I think at this time we don’t have any indication of fuel that is currently melting,” IAEA safety official James Lyons said.

“The Japanese authorities are working as hard as they can, under extremely difficult circumstances, to stabilise the nuclear power plants and ensure safety,” Amano told the agency’s first news conference since Friday’s earthquake. March 15

An IAEA safety officer offered these comforting words

“I think at this time we don’t have any indication of fuel that is currently melting,” IAEA safety official James Lyons said. March 15

Secretary Crick indicated the source of the IAEA’s problems in an address to the UN General Assembly Fourth Committee in 2007. After noting that,

The secretariat was also beset by staffing problems: after the post for one of two professionals within the secretariat was abolished in 1992, it had become ever more difficult for it to keep pace with new scientific developments. Malcolm Crick, UN General Assembly, Fourth Committee, October 29, 2007

We have yet to hear the excuse for IAEA director general Amano’s ignorance at the eleventh hour.

The knew or should have known

“… the real embarrassment for the Japanese government is not so much the nature of the accident but the fact it was warned long ago about the risks it faced in building nuclear plants in areas of intense seismic activity. Several years ago, the seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko stated, specifically, that such an accident was highly likely to occur. Nuclear power plants in Japan have a “fundamental vulnerability” to major earthquakes, Katsuhiko said in 2007. The government, the power industry and the academic community had seriously underestimated the potential risks posed by major quakes.” The Guardian, March 12

At The Automatic Earth, poster Stoneleigh, (Nicole Foss) presents a scathing and comprehensive indictment of the ignorance and negligence required to create the current catastrophe. Foss holds a law degree with a focus on nuclear issues. The Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies published her study, Nuclear Safety and International Governance: Russia and Eastern Europe by N Foss, in 1999. The entire post by Stoneleigh is highly recommended.

Foss marches through the sequence of events that will define the coming scandal of nuclear negligence with documentation at each step. One of the most interesting points concerns the tests on TEPCO (Tokyo power) Fukushima I reactors, No. 1 and No2. The power company built the plant. It did not use test procedures to account for the recent earthquake:

“Simultaneous seismic activity along the three tectonic plates in the sea east of the plants—the epicenter of Friday’s quake—wouldn’t surpass 7.9, according to the company’s presentation. The company based its models partly on previous seismic activity in the area, including a 7.0 earthquake in May 1938 and two simultaneous earthquakes of 7.3 and 7.5 on November 5 of the same year… Stoneleigh, The Automatic Earth, March 13

The test was devised to assure that the plant and reactors passed the test. It’s that simple.

Foss makes this insightful comment about comparisons to Chernobyl:

Non-technical comparisons between Fukushima and Chernobyl are more apt, specifically in terms of governance in the nuclear industry and complacency as to risk. Nuclear insiders in many jurisdictions are notorious for being an unaccountable power unto themselves, and failing to release critical information publicly. Stoneleigh, The Automatic Earth, March 13

Fukushima I is a man made disaster just as the next disaster will be man made. Why? Because men forged ahead despite science and common sense to build these ticking time bombs that will inevitibly fail at a rate greater than zero. We now have the first frame of a total picture that defines the horror of nuclear energy.

Those in charge are just warming up. They have more in store for us.

Bringing it Home – “A Confederacy of Dunces” Prevails in Washington

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, endorsed ongoing efforts for nuclear power

“This discussion reminds me, somewhat, of the conversations that were going on after the BP oil spill last year,” Mr. McConnell said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t think right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good time to be making American domestic policy.” Wall Street Journal, M arch 13

In the tradition of The Money Party, that bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans who do the heavy lifting for the ruling elite, President Obama came through as expected:

Obama Stands by Nuclear Power

WASHINGTON—Obama administration officials Monday brushed aside calls for a freeze on new U.S. nuclear power development, and sought to reassure the public the nation’s nuclear facilities are safe and the threat of harmful radiation reaching U.S. soil from Japan is minimal.

The Obama administration has said it wants to speed construction of nuclear-power facilities as part of a strategy to support sources of energy that emit little or no carbon dioxide or other gases linked to climate change.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday that Mr. Obama continued to support nuclear power, and that the administration would incorporate lessons from the Japanese accident into regulations. Wall Street Journal, March 15

Are these people completely out of their minds? (Rhetorical question)

END

This article may be reproduced entirely or in part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

N.B. Special thanks to The Week for featuring yesterday’s article, Post Nuclear Japan, Pre Disaster United States. Also thanks to users at The Agonist for their comments in a lively and informative ongoing discussion.

Losing: Why Republicans should run in 2012 -- to lose

Topic:

2012 Elections

Sunday, Mar 13, 2011 10:01 ET

War Room

Why Republicans should run in 2012 -- to lose

By Thomas Schaller

• 
  

AP Top left, clockwise: Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour

The Ides of March are almost upon us, but few potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates seem to have their eyes fixed squarely on the White House. As Salon's Steve Kornacki argued recently, the most obvious reason for the largely vacant GOP field -- sorry, Herman Cain -- is that the prospects of a Republican beating a once-again formidable Barack Obama seem rather bleak. The 2012 Republican nomination may be a prize not worth winning.

Because the nomination isn't worth winning, however, doesn't mean it is ill-advised for Republican hopefuls to run in 2012. In fact, if three historical patterns tell us anything, the smart play for any Republican who hopes someday to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office is to run in 2012 -- but to lose the nomination.

The first pattern is that the party of an incumbent president running for reelection to a second or even first full term wins about two-thirds of the time, whereas the incumbent party only wins about half the time when the presidency is an "open seat" with an ineligible incumbent. In the post-war presidential era, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush lost their re-election bids, but Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all won. If you had to bet the house on who will be standing on the west steps of the U.S. Capitol building with his (or her) hand on the Bible on January 20, 2013, the smart money is on Obama.

Strongly related to this is another very powerful historical trend: the inability of either party to win the presidency thrice consecutively. Since 1952, that feat has been attempted six times but achieved just once, when Bush 41 won a "Reagan legacy" victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988. Presuming the first pattern holds and Obama wins a second term, history would then strongly favor the Republican nominee in 2016.

• Continue reading

The third pattern involves capturing the Republican nomination. With the exceptions of Bush 43 and the highly unusual case of Ford, every GOP nominee in the post-Barry Goldwater era has run at least once and lost before eventually gaining the party's nod. Reagan, Bush 41, Bob Dole and John McCain all fell short in earlier bids -- two bids, in Reagan's and Dole's cases -- but each came back for a successful subsequent run.

Put these three patterns together, and '12 should be the ideal cycle for a Republican to run, lose, and then set himself or herself up to win the whole enchilada four years later. So who's best positioned to employ this lose-to-win strategy?

Candidates who ran and lost in 2008 -- including Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney -- could theoretically run and lose again, then still come back for a third, successful attempt. But third tries can be problematic; there's always the chance that after two failed runs, a candidate will be dismissed as a has-been. Indeed, if Romney wants to be president he will probably have to run, win the nomination and beat Obama right now. But because Obama's prospects are strong, the former Massachusetts governor is, in reality, perfectly positioned to be the GOP's sacrificial lamb in '12.

Sarah Palin, the only woman in serious consideration for '12, should also be set aside. Palin technically didn't run for president in 2008, but the founding Mama Grizzly has become such a national figure that the idea of her waging an icebreaking, run-to-lose presidential campaign in '12 to prime herself for 2016 is patently absurd. If she runs and loses the nomination in '12 -- or wins it and gets clobbered by Obama (as polls suggest she would) -- Palin's already dwindling electoral capital would take an October 1929-like nosedive. If and when she ever declares, hers has to be a one-and-done candidacy.

Thus, the subset of potential '12 candidates who would be true first-timers is limited to Michelle Bachmann, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump and Cain. In theory, the '12 cycle could be ideal for any or all of them to gain broader name recognition, cultivate supporters and donors, and test their messages with GOP primary voters and the national media with an eye toward '16.

But for the sake of both brevity and sanity, I hope you'll forgive me if I simply punt on considering Bachmann, Cain, Huntsman, Santorum and Trump as viable candidates in this or any future cycle. I'm also not including Newt Gingrich, who seems ready to convert his exploratory campaign into an officially announced one at any moment, even though '12 would technically be his first White House bid. But like Palin, the former House speaker is an old and familiar name in national politics, so the lose-to-win logic doesn't apply for him. Like Romney, Gingrich would have to run and win the whole thing now, or just wait until '16.

That narrows the field of run-to-lose prospects for '12 to two current governors and one former one: Mississippi's Barbour, Indiana's Daniels, and Minnesota's Pawlenty. All three can and should announce their presidential candidacies and then proceed to spend as much time introducing themselves to the kinds of voters who would be key to their hopes in '16: Midwestern suburban women for Barbour, southern conservatives for Daniels and Pawlenty, Mountain-state Mormons for all three. After intentionally but gracefully losing next year's nomination, each of them could then earn party plaudits by throwing their vigorous support behind the winner (Romney, presumably) -- while, of course, being smart enough not to accept any vice presidential offers.

Of the three, my sense is that Barbour has more than Daniels or Pawlenty to gain from a '12 run-to-lose candidacy. Barbour is an institutional guy with deep party roots, but also a former lobbyist and governor with a thick southern accent. In other words, he's the kind of pol who takes a while not merely to get to know, but to grow comfortable with. A follow-up effort after four years of doing retail work in the Republican trenches could serve Barbour very, very well in '16.

I should also mention Jeb Bush. There are two explanations for why he won't run in '12. The first is that he presumes that his brother's model -- and not his father's -- applies to him; that is, he thinks he can win the nomination on his first try. The second explanation flows from the first: If Bush can win the nomination on his first try, '12 is not the cycle to do it. So Bush might as well wait four years (during which time Bush family fatigue will presumably lessen). This also makes Bush the one person who could ruin a run-to-lose strategy for anyone who tries it in '12.

But who knows what Bush is thinking? For now, the bottom line for Barbour, Daniels and Pawlenty is: Go for it! You've got nothing to lose next year. Or, rather, you have everything to lose -- for now, at least.

• Thomas F. Schaller is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the author of "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South." More: Thomas F. Schaller

Economists Don't Know Poverty

Post Normal

Barefoot Economics

It's time for economists to start getting dirty.

Adbusters , 08 Mar 2011



Jim Denevan / Beach Spiral / 2005

From an interview with Manfred Max-Neef on Democracy Now!. Manfred Max-Neef is an acclaimed Chilean economist and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award. He is the author of From the Outside Looking in: Experiences in Barefoot Economics and the upcoming Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good.

I worked for about ten years in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle and urban areas of Latin America. And one day at the beginning of that period I found myself in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all day. And I was standing in the slum. And across from me, a guy was standing in the mud – not in the slum, in the mud. He was a short guy … thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley. As we looked at each other, I suddenly realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything felt absurd. Economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, they have all the statistics, they make all the models and are convinced they know everything. But they don’t understand poverty.

I live in the south of Chile in the deep south. And that area is known for its milk production. Top technologically, and in every way the best there is. A few months ago I was in a hotel there for breakfast, and there were these little butter things. I looked at one. It was butter from New Zealand. And I thought, isn’t that crazy? Why? The answer is because economists don’t know how to calculate true costs. To bring butter from 10,000 kilometers to a place where you already make the best butter, under the argument that it is cheaper, is a colossal stupidity. They don’t take into consideration the environmental impact of 10,000 kilometers of transport. And part of the reason it’s cheaper is because it’s subsidized. So it’s clearly a case in which the prices do not tell the truth. It’s all tricks. And those tricks do colossal harm. If you bring consumption closer to production, you will eat better, you will have better food, you will know where it comes from and you may even know the person who produces it. You will humanize consumption. But the way economics is practiced today is totally dehumanized.

We need cultured economists, economists who know the history, where the ideas come from, how the ideas originated, who did what; an economics that understands itself very clearly as a subsystem of the larger system of the biosphere. Today’s economists know nothing about ecosystems, nothing about thermodynamics, nothing about biodiversity – they are totally ignorant in those respects. And I don’t see what harm it would do to an economist to know that if the beasts and nature disappear, he would disappear as well because there wouldn’t be food to eat. But today’s economists don’t know that we depend absolutely on nature. For them, nature is a subsystem of our economy. It’s absolutely crazy!