Jon Taplin's Home Page

Gov. Schwarzenegger will sign the California budget today after an 85 day stalemate brought about by the truculent blackmail of a minority Republican cabal. California state law requires a 2/3rds majority to pass the state budget. There is a growing revolt among California progressives to overturn this law which allows the minority so much power. The Courage Campaign is about to call for a Constitutional Convention next spring to overturn this law. They need support. If we are ever going to realize the benefits of the New Federalism, this is where we start.

If the Paulson manages to push through the Bank Bailout, the Federal budget deficit is going to cripple the kind of innovative government programs that can help transition our economy to an Energy Technology (ET)resurgence. California, where much of the innovation is being invented and financed, will need to be much more independent from the Federal Government in order to thrive.

If the ET (Energy Technology) Revolution is going to be one of the pillars of American Renewal, then the General Electric Company will be in the vanguard. Jeff Immelt has built their wind, solar and water technology divisions to be world leaders. But the company is dragged down by their giant G.E. Capital division, which would be the nations fifth largest bank if it were a stand alone.

Immelt should split the company in two or sell off G.E. Capital to Warren Buffet. Then he could run the world’s preeminent green infrastructure business. That would show the future of American manufacturing.

Before we all blindly follow John McCain into allowing Big Oil access to even more of our public patrimony, we might observe the cautionary tale of the Minerals Management Service, the people who are supposed to make sure the taxpayers get paid by the oil companies.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes. “A culture of ethical failure” pervades the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.  The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

It appears that regular cocaine and sex parties on trips paid for by oil industry lobbyists were part of the “ethical failures. Oil companies love to drill on leased government land, because they often can skip paying royalties.

During the mid-nineties, whistleblowers and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog group, filed suit against sixteen oil companies for failing to pay their required royalties. POGO’s suit was filed under the False Claims Act (FCA), which provides citizens the power to sue on behalf of the federal government for fraud.

Tom Friedman worries that Obama is not connecting on the gut level the way he was in the spring. It’s time for some passion. Here are some possible words for Barack.

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My fellow Americans. Tonight I want to talk to you about a crisis that threatens to engulf our country. I speak not about an attack from an external enemy like Al Qaeda, but rather about an insidious internal corruption of our political system that has been going on for 30 years. The corruption of politicians by the big money interests have drained your treasury and put us collectively in unimaginable debt. As former Treasury Secretary Pete Peterson has shown, each one of you listening to me is carrying $175,000 of the $52 trillion debt as your share. This is the inheritance you are leaving to your children–a $350,000 debt for a couple. For eight of those 30 years, under Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party worked diligently to bring budgets back in balance and when we turned over the government to George Bush there was actually a budget surplus. But once The White House was returned to Republican control, the lobbyists and the special interests were allowed back into controlling government agencies and the pigs were at the trough. Yesterday it was reported that this year’s deficit soared to $407 Billion and that we will add another $2.3 trillion to that debt you will hand to your children in the next ten years.

Now my opponent has been in Congress for 25 of the 30 years of this disaster and during that time, he has had to appear before the ethics committee for using his influence for a convicted Savings and Loan swindler named Charles Keating. Senator McCain will tell you that he “got religion” during that process and learned his lessons. But I have to ask you, what has he done in the last eight years to stop running up the bills on your national credit card? He has supported George Bush’s tax cuts for millionaires, draining billions from the Treasury that could have been used to pay down your children’s debt. He has championed a War in Iraq that costs us $12 billion a month and for which you will be paying for years as we absorb the costs of caring for the tens of thousands of brave men and women who were maimed in that conflict and will live for years with prosthetic limbs and glass eyes. Think of where we might have spent that $2 trillion that might have improved the schools your children attend or the failing bridges in your towns. But John McCain has promised to continue George Bush’s War and George Bush’s tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. By that definition it would be insane to believe that McCain and Palin are going to change Washington. Read more…

2005 Dodge Durango

On the heels of the Federal Bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Detroit automakers drove into Washington in their largest SUV’s pleading for Federal Loan guarantees in order to “transition” to more energy efficient fleets. This is nonsense and would be a government payoff for years of stupidity on the part of the managements of the Big Three automakers. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter believed that almost all businesses, no matter how strong they seem to be at a given moment, ultimately fail and almost always because they failed to innovate. He called this process Creative Destruction. To compare the management of Toyota and Chrysler over the past 15 years is to realize that Chrysler “deserves to die”. They brought their destruction on their own heads by spending more money on lobbyists to prevent the government from raising CAFE fuels standards than they did on R & D for efficient engines. As Schumpeter said, “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” Toyota and Honda manufacture efficent cars in American factories employing American workers. What is it about Chrysler that makes it worthy of an American taxpayer bailout?

The ultimate exhaustion of the neoconservative philosophy that has ruled the Republican Party since the ascension of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is that it ended in building the greatest Corporate Welfare State in the history of this or any other Republic. By the time George Bush limps out of office we will have seen trillions of the tax payers money invested in propping up brain-dead bankers, automakers, airlines and military contractors.

If the American public and the press are unwilling to realize that the last 8 years of Republican rule was the greatest corporate raid on the treasury ever, then it will be as much the fault of the Democrats for their complicity and their refusal to make this the campaign issue, as it is the fault of McCain and Palin and their lobbyist managers who can’t wait for their turn at the public trough.

I’ve been reading The Way We’ll Be by John Zogby, the famous pollster. I really recommend it because it uses very hard data to show that the general direction of the country is headed our way. Zogby totally refutes the conventional wisdom about the U.S.–that we’re super patriots intent on dominating the world and inclined towards material pleasure. He sees four “meta-movements” occurring simultaneously: living with limits as consumers and citizens; embracing diversity of views and ways of life; looking inward to find spiritual comfort; and demanding authenticity from the media and our leaders.

One of the most fascinating findings is his identification of a cohort of liberals he calls “Secular Spiritualists”.

Their personal relationship to God or any particular faith or creed, or their lack of same, might be a key issue in their own lives, but it’s not a salient issue in defining their relationship one to the other. Rather, what pulls them together and gives them definition is the need to move beyond professional and financial ambition, the acquisition of things, and the quest for a luxurious lifestyle.

It’s a rather large cohort who are saying, “I just want a simpler life.” I have heard those sentiments reflected on these pages many times, but the cool thing about Zogby’s book is that it proves beyond a doubt that we are not alone in that sentiment.

The Northwest Passage is no longer a myth. The North Pole is freely navigable as of last week.  

Hurricane Wind Speeds

We had a pretty spirited discussion a few days ago about the relationship of warming oceans to the intensity of hurricane season. Yesterday the new issue of the journal Nature, published the most definitive research on the topic.

A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and a half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warming has already made storms more destructive.

It’s not conclusive, but pretty convincing that the big storms are getting stronger and more destructive.

Halliburton CEO-Dick Cheney

When Alan Greespan said the Iraq war was “all about oil”, he spilled the beans on the one global obsession of our Vice President and former Oil Services CEO–U.S. control of global oil supplies. Well, Tricky Dick is back at it again in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan, like Georgia, is a former Soviet republic that has sought closer ties to the West and the United States, and it is considered a vital crossroads for oil and gas from the Caspian Sea.

Underscoring the point, Mr. Cheney’s first meetings here in Baku were with representatives of two international oil companies: William Schrader of BP Azerbaijan and Robert Satmalchi of Chevron, according to a spokeswoman, Megan M. Mitchell. She said they discussed “their assessments of the energy situation in Azerbaijan and the broader Caspian region — especially in light of Russia’s recent military actions in Georgia.”

The U.S. is about to pour $1 billion into Georgia, some of it probably sophisticated military aid. Did Congress actually approve this appropriation, or is there some Dick Cheney slush fund they can take it from?

I was at Princeton from 1965-1969. Despite the right’s narrative that the country went to hell in those years, for most of us at the school they were glorious years of celebration, solidarity and justice. But we had one classmate who was like the nerd who couldn’t get a date, but also was willing to assure us all we were going to hell for our sins of sex, drugs and Rock and Roll. His name was Richard Land and he has served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission since 1988.

For a guy who was a scold at 19, it’s a perfect job. But Richrd is up in St. Paul at the Republican Convention, on his version of Ecstasy over Sarah Palin.

In Minneapolis, “it was as if the whole Republican convention had started drinking Red Bull,” said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who added that when the McCain campaign had sought his input weeks before he had suggested picking Ms. Palin.

Yes the Bible Belt is truly thrilled at the promise of a John McCain Supreme Court that would kill Roe V. Wade.

McCain used a recent appearance with the Rev. Rick Warrenat Saddleback Church in California to embrace opposition to abortion more explicitly than President Bush ever did. Asked when a fetus gains human rights, Mr. McCain responded, “At the moment of conception.”

And he has abandoned previous calls to moderate the Republican platform’s support for a ban on abortion without exception. Instead, he allowed conservative organizers like Phyllis Schlafly to shape what many advocates say is the most conservative platform in the party’s history. At Ms. Schlafly’s behest, for example, the party approved an immigration plank calling for new laws to speed widespread deportations and other punitive measures at odds with Mr. McCain’s stance on one of his signature issues.

And, to satisfy the Rush Limbaugh Global Warming deniers, the Palin pick signals a drill anywhere and everywhere McCain administration in the pocket of Big Oil. As Tom Friedman pointed out this morning,

Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.”

I assume the Obama campaign is producing a set of environmental themed ads to highlight the obvious disconnect between those phony “Green Ads” McCain ran during the Olympics and the reality of his policy.