Age in the Age of the Tea Party

We all have opinions and ideas about the Tea Party by now. Some of us think we know what they stand for. We've seen who they nominate for elections of all stripes and we've seen how they run those elections. So, my question at this point is this.

Does the Tea Party care what happens to young people long term?

I think they don't. I don't believe that the Tea Party as an entity cares one bit about what the country will look like for those of us in our 20s and 30s when we're in our 50s and 60s. You want proof, right? Okay. Let's look at the facts.

The Huffington Post has an article up here that suggests that the Tea Party is disproportionately elderly. The relevant section says this.

the demographics of the movement seemingly align with those who traditionally vote for the conservative candidate as well. Fifty-six percent of Tea Party respondents are male; 22 percent are over the age of 65 (compared with just 14 percent who are between the ages of 18 and 34)

Compare that to 12% (as of 2004) and rising for the whole country. There's no doubt that the Tea Party is more elderly than the country on average. The Huffington Post article also notes that 14% of the Tea Party is 18-34. Compare that to roughly the same number for all Americans who are in that same age bracket. So that's the Tea Party. But what about their candidates and positions. Do they espouse positions that benefit older Americans at the expense of those of us who've lived less? Check out what Rand Paul, Tea Party candidate for Senate in Kentucky has to say. That's from the conservative Washington Post. Rand Paul wants to raise the retirement age for "younger workers" (he's not specific on who that is) in order to pay for things like an extension of the Bush tax cuts on those making $250,000 or more per year. And we all know that those of us in the 18-34 bracket are much less likely to be in that group. That's how the corporate ladder works. You hit the jackpot once you've been on the job for a long time and proved your worth. And it probably should work that way. But, the point here is that we're not getting bonuses now for a raised retirement age. We're getting screwed in order to pay for bonuses for old corporate VPs like the guys at Goldman Sachs. To be fair, that WaPo article suggests that the Democratic nominee in Kentucky also wants to extend all the tax cuts. Good job there Mr. Conway.

Then there's Sharron Angle. Check out how she feels about Healthcare Reform. Just the other week on September 23rd it banned denying children coverage because of pre-existing conditions. This bill is good for young people. It's good for young people because the jobs that we increasingly hold, hourly jobs with no benefits, allow us to stay on our parents healthcare until the age of 26. That also went into effect on the 23rd. And it creates a system where healthcare may just become affordable one day. Most older people have healthcare though their work. We aren't like that. Just check it out here. She says there is "nothing good in this law." Also, for nerds out there like me, they set that ad to the theme music for Battlestar Galactica. Win.

Those are just two of a litany of examples, but I think my point is proven when I say that the Tea Party has no interest in protecting younger people in America. Vote at your own risk.

Here we go again.

My friend E who has his blog over at www.impossibletospell.com has an older post that I just now got around to reading that I think might be worth taking a look at. You can find it here. In it he posits essentially that there will be a "bubble" that is created around "green" jobs (specifically biofuel) much in the same way there was the .com bubble that was created and then wreaked havoc when it burst in the late 1990s. I think the theory is sound and want to play around with this idea a bit. Forgive me.

He starts by addressing the economics of the issue, talking about supply vs. demand and the Peak Oil phenomenon. All right on the mark.

I know environmentalists have been going on about peak oil since the 70′s, but it is bound to happen sooner or later. Note that doesn’t mean we’ll wake up one day to find the wells all dry. Just that we’ve drilled the most convenient wells first, and the price of oil will go up as the petroleum industry has to move on to lower grade wells, in less convenient places (ahem, Gulf of Mexico, ahem), at greater cost.

He wrote this fairly early into what is now the Deepwater Horizon Saga but you can see what he's getting at. In fact, I would argue that unless government regulations about where and how we drill for oil change, especially in very deep waters we're going to have more Deepwater Horizons in our future and it's because we've already hit peak oil and are beginning to feel it. The Deepwater Horizon well is in 5000 feet of water. That's a mile under the surface of the ocean essentially. Do you think it was cheap for BP to drill that well? And do you think if there were easier wells for them to drill they'd drill them? Yeah. We've already tapped the easy stuff. Now it's just a question of watching as quality goes down and price goes up. We've already had a little taste when gas was $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008 and a simple google search of the terms "$4 a gallon gas" produce a number of predictions that we'll see it again before the summer is gone. In milder terms, we've already mentally adjusted to a shift. I paid $3.13/gallon yesterday on the West Coast and I know that $2.50 is pretty normal in places where the prices trend lower than the national average. I can remember when gas was $0.99/gallon as a kid and how everyone started freaking out when it was suddenly $1.05. Welcome to the soft slide into the long fall that is peak oil.

Anyway, back to the biofuels. Simple high school economics explains why, as gas gets more expensive and it's quality goes down, alternatives that we now consider a tad too expensive will increase their market share. In fact, they already are in a tangential sort of way with the popularity of the Toyota Prius and new entries into America's fleet of vehicles coming soon like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt (just priced at $41,000!) A number of different competitors exist including biodiesel, wind, solar, hell even nuclear is on the table. Suddenly that giant pile of radioactive goo left over doesn't look so bad.

Moreover, many of those technologies are expensive for ‘fixable’ reasons–there’s room for more R&D to make them cheaper or more efficient, they haven’t had the chance to get good economies-of-scale going (look at the price on electric cars). Oil and coal companies have benefited disproportionately from having the living shit subsidized out of them, but that could change. Not that I expect the US will stop kissing oil company ass any time soon, but if Monsanto or the Iowa Corn Growers Association decide they want to be move into the energy market, they may get the way paved for them.

Yet another way to use the insane amount of corn grown in the midwest under federal subsidy. But farm subsidy reform and the food system are topics for another post.

He goes on to say, as I covered earlier up top, that the bust comes in if the economy does the same thing with new fuel sources that it did with the internet in the late 1990s. There IS an uncertainty about which of these new technologies will be what drives human power and innovation into the future. I'll grant that. I will however step aside for one moment and try and highlight one major difference between this and the .com bubble. While starting up an internet company requires capital it isn't physical in the way creating a company that builds thin-film solar cells or blades for an off-shore wind turbine are. I think that the physicality and the financial demands that are required to get in my be a hurdle that will help screen out all the "comp-sci dropouts with witty webaddresses", or at least a good number of them. Are their going to be businesses that fail as this industry emerges into its own, sure. But I'd like to think (and maybe I'm naive) that we'll figure this one out, if for no other reason than because we have to.

The real trick is that we an opportunity to set up a whole new industry here. Will we do it right, or will Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (metaphorically speaking) run the whole industry? We can just look at our government and see what happens when industry condenses to one or two major companies in an industry. You get crappy service and a high bill from AT&T and Verizon, it's all semantics which one you pick. You get screwed by the oil and gas industry no matter where the gas in your tank right now is BP or ExxonMobil. This is an opportunity we can't pass up. We MUST demand that this industry be built sustainably to create energy for us all instead of to create wealth for the very few.

And now we hit the crux of the matter.

...when I talk to non-scientists, including some really smart people about this issue, I hear a lot of variations on ‘Ok, so which one will it be? When the oil runs out, will we switch to ethanol? Will everything be solar powered? Who’s gonna win?’ The answer is, no one technology will replace the oil industry, ever. There’s no magic bullet. If oil and coal go way up in price, if consumers even ever start having to pay the full price of the mess they make, we’re not just going to swap one energy source for another and go on like nothing happened.

We need to get ready. Our lives are going to change whether we like it or not. If we don't prepare for it it just means that when they do, it'll be that much uglier. It means changing where and how we live, what sort of density we think is appropriate (hint: think Europe or China, not rural Idaho or suburban California), what, how, and how often we use our vehicles, where and how we buy our food, and what we do to make a living. The era of cheap, easy energy is over. We've used up what's on our planet. Now we get to figure it out.

Copy and Paste

This article over at Pandagon was excellent. It goes in depth on several other laws coming down the pipe in Arizona following Papers Please. I'm gonna talk about a couple of sections but you really ought to read the whole thing. All bolding is mine.

English-only is classic wingnuttery, right down to the bad faith.  The stated intentions are to help kids, but the reality is that the initiatives are about making sure students don’t learn any other skills while learning English.  It’s a racist program that aims to make sure the children of immigrants have just enough skills to do manual and service labor, but no skills that would make middle class aspirations a possibility. 

 This is the issue right here. Whenever right wingers have the "gall" to talk about immigration reform (and fewer and fewer of them are) it's always in the context of letting people into the country to do jobs that Americans refuse to do. They just want to gain the political points with the independents for doing immigration reform and ensure they're strawberries keep getting picked and their chickens keep getting plucked. These people are getting paid but usually minimum wage or lower to do these sorts of jobs. At the risk of sounding pretty strong language wise here, this looks like modern day, legal slavery to me. It's all about making sure that we have a poor class of people who have little choice than to do our dirty work. By keeping important skills from immigrants and children of immigrants we ensure that there isn't and there won't ever be a large, vibrant hispanic middle class. And that, ostensibly, is the American Dream. Which is bullshit itself, but that's another post.

Proponents really do believe that Latinos have nothing to offer, and they often treat them like they’re not even human beings.  Immigrants especially get this kind of treatment.  Having grown up in the Southwest, I can tell you that a lot of the racism that white people express has an undercurrent of insecurity to it.

I didn't grow up in the Southwest. I grew up in the Southeast and 100% of this is still the case. People get pissed when they can't understand what the people ahead of them in line are saying etc. This is, in my experience, a large part of the racism that still pervades the Old South in regards to African-Americans too. White supremacists seem to be deathly afraid that white culture, anglo culture, won't be able to survive unless it's enforced upon everyone. I haven't heard anything so silly in a long time. By that logic white people aren't as good. If our culture would die unless it's dominant than clearly people of color (who's many cultures continue to thrive while assaulted by white racism every day) are better than we are. You can twist this argument around all you want.

More on Senate Races

I read this today on Firedoglake and it got me thinking. Reid was/is looking at a very very difficult race for his own seat in Nevada. That's a big deal, even in a year that is as anti-incumbent as this one. But all of this is still up in the air. Will the Tea Party candidate run, my gut says yes. What we're essentially looking at here is the Tea Party serving as the Ralph Nader of the Nevada senate race. Only this time the Dems may come out on top.

I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't think I've said so before, but I don't like Harry Reid much. I think he's an ineffective party leader and he doesn't have enough spine to get the things done that need to be taken care of. But if I compare that to putting a Republican in that seat, I have to say I'm torn. On the one hand, if Reid loses, we get a new (hopefully more effective) party leader. Names like Dick Durbin have been thrown around. But, this scenario also means one less seat in the Senate for Democrats to be able to do the things we need them to do. I don't care what kind of reform you're pulling for most be it healthcare, the banking system, or something else; your best bet is to have as many Democrats in Congress as possible.