Schreiner’s Media Landscape

It’s no surprise the Pentagon is refusing to follow the EPA’s order to clean up three toxic waste dumps. The Bush Reich has been telling the EPA to ignore facts since Day One and let polluters do what they want. When the EPA does try to act, the White House rewrites their orders to make them conform to the Way of the Destroyers. Additionally, Cheney et al have been working behind the scenes all that time in direct opposition to all existing environmental laws making the EPA’s effort even more laughable- in a very sad way.

With the military being Bush/Cheney Inc.’s favorite client, you think the Pentagon is going to do anything the EPA says? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…

That’s not funny.

The Bush Regime is famous for ignoring facts, creating fake ones and using those to justify their decisions. There was lots of evidence showing that ethanol is not a good answer to America’s renewable energy troubles: high gas prices, dwindling supplies, air pollution and greenhouse gases. The only thing it was sure to do was exactly what the Regime has fought during its endlessly destructive reign: make wealthy, government subsidized farmers even more government subsidized and wealthier. But the irony doesn’t end there.

Bush’s ethanol policy has created a number of different problems without solving the one it was supposed to. Corn prices shot up causing food prices to do the same, corn was taken out of the food supply to make fuel causing food shortages, and it’s making our air dirtier while doing nothing to ease gas prices or shortages. Now, with floods drowning much of the midwestern corn crop, it will make matters even worse.

If we could only get our president and his minions to just stop doing anything it will be easier to reverse the damage. But like Iowa’s floodwaters, it’s going to take a long time. And we won’t see all the damage until Bush, Cheney and these masters of disaster have receded entirely.

Anguish ripples through NASCAR’s burgeoning bleachers as fans ponder the possibility of a Brazilian-Belgian megacorporation buying out iconic Budweiser and a bunch of others under the Anheuser-Busch banner. Even barley growers are nervous that the sale will mean an end of a free lunch (isn’t Bud made from rice?). Not having consciously drunk a Bud for nearly 25 years (deliberately- it sucks), I could care less if A-B is devoured by a bigger fish. In fact, I think it would give Americans incentive to drink something other than Bud, Coors, or other corporate swill. Good for the taste buds, good for the economy.

One of my great memories as a kid was watching my Uncle Fooney (who recently passed on) and Grandpa Wagner make beer at the Superfine Brewery in Marathon, Wisconsin back in the early 1960s. I remember them working around the big copper kettles and the smell of fresh hops cooking. A few years later, the brewery was shuttered, bought out or driven out of business like most locally-owned Wisconsin breweries by the bigger, corporate brewers like Budweiser, Miller, Heileman, etc. Fooney and Grandpa never mentioned it or, if they did, I was too young to understand why such a great, little brewery had to go away.

Of course, I was right. The Superfine brewery didn’t have to go away and shouldn’t have. In fact, little breweries are popping up all over the country again after fifty years of lousy, overpriced beer like Budweiser and the pointless, destructive elimination of local jobs, local business and local pride. American microbreweries produce some of the best beer in the world now. Even with Bud still selling 50% of the beer in America (!), they apparently don’t make enough money to stave off the buyout predators. They’re not making enough money and their beer still sucks. Sound like good business to you?

So sell the whole darn thing off, I say. There are so many good and affordable beers in America, this will only mean good things for the American economy, NASCAR fans (drink American!) and most important, beer itself. Americans need something new to smile about and be proud of. And better beer made by hard-working, entrepreneurial Americans living in our own communities is the best way to start.

The review of new solar projects for federal facilities is just another pathetic attempt by the Bush Reich to stave off the inevitable and give the dying fossil fuel industry a chance to pollute and price-gouge yet another day. But like ending renewable energy tax incentives, blocking federal subsidies for alternative energy development and doing nothing to stop Big Oil’s rape of America, this latest Regime tactic is just going to backfire by placing the U.S. even farther behind the world in renewable energy and producing an explosive effort to catch up as soon as the current idiots leave Washington. Not soon enough.

Here in Maui, where I’ve been the past few days, the sun shines virtually all the time except for a few days when a storm blows through. The solar capabilities here are seemingly endless. But most hotels, stores, and buildings don’t have solar here. Why? In a word, developers. Most of the new construction here is homes and time-shares for people who don’t have to think about what kind of power they use because they’ve got enough money to afford anything they want. Most people on Maui don’t make enough to afford a new home or solar power. It’s really up to the developers and the government to something and finally they’re acting.  Hawai’i now requires all new homes have solar water heaters. A step in the right direction. But it reveals the lack of foresight among builders, developers, real estate people and others who could help Hawai’i become a better place to live by implementing renewable energy, including wind, biomass and geothermal of which Hawai’i has plenty.

Instead, you have a state that is choking on high gas, power, transportation, housing and virtually everything as pollution, traffic, waste and overpopulation grow. If there was a place that needed to do something, Hawai’i is it. But the same could be said for just about every other sun-belt and western state including Utah. This is a start. But it will take a long time for governments and developers to break their old habits and do the right thing by their customers and the Earth. It’s an American problem. But we can’t wait for Bush or any other federal help. Like Hawai’i, the energy crisis is going to be solved state by state, city by city, house by house. And that, perhaps, is the best solution to not just our energy problem, but our federal government problem.

Anyone who reads environmental news knows that the affects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill now almost twenty years ago have caused seemingly irreparable damage to Prince William Sound, its flora, fauna and residents. The “cleanup,” though declared complete in 1992 (Mission Accomplished anyone?) obviously still goes on with the emphasis and money mostly going toward more and more tests on the non-human victims without any real help in restoring the sound to its original state or anything close to restitution for the people who lost their homes, businesses, livelihoods and ways of life.

So to add a final insult to this unprecedented injury, the benevolent U.S. Supreme Court- always looking out for the people and democracy- have cut the original court-ejudicated reward to the victims from $5 billion to $500 million or $15,000 per resident. Does that sound right to you? Didn’t think so. If you lost EVERYTHING due to a corporation’s or individual’s negligence, would it amount to $15,000? Well, that’s the Bush Court. Defending corporate America’s incompetence and arrogance right down to the bitterest of ends.

After reporting even greater, record profits, does the Bush Reich truly think that cutting the reward is just and essential in helping Exxon Mobil stay afloat to pollute freely another day? The concept of corporations as citizens in America is so out-of-control that pretty soon, corporations will be demanding the right to abortion, vote, and carry guns (which they already do anyway in Iraq). The sad legacy grows.

Utah congressman Chris Cannon’s interviews after losing to that better-looking, younger Republican whose name is inconsequential remind me of the famous Foster Brooks comedy routine where a drunk couple is arguing, the husband melodramatically holds a gun to his head, his wife starts chuckling to which the man replies “don’t laugh- you’re next.”

Oddly though, he’s right. While Cannon committed suicide by making one arrogant and half-thought-out statement, decision and mistake after another, his GOP buddies stand to suffer the same fate in November. With that in mind, we are starting to see Republicans act a tad more responsibly in Congress but not enough to make a difference. Recent votes on the alternative minimum tax, renewable energy tax credits and anything that might hurt Big Oil show that they intend on doing the same thing over and over again until every last one of them is voted out.

Isn’t that the definition of insanity? More topically: isn’t that our president?

More articles like this one in the NYT are proclaiming the end of the extravagant and greatly nonsensical exurban lifestyle: driving incredible hours and burning exhorbitant amounts of fuel to live in a house surrounded by corn and deer. While I’m one of the first in line to applaud this, it’s going to take a long time for exurbans to give up their massive commutes and 5,000 sq. ft. McBarns, much like NRA members could not live without their .38s in their cold, dead hands.

Now the real problem begins: what do you do with all those depreciating, faux mansions in the middle of nowhere? As more people move closer to where they work for economic survival, the Potemkin villages they built as a sad homage to real neighborhoods will stand empty. That is unless the owners and developers agree to level the whole thing and either turn it back into farmland (ain’t gonna happen- not enough money in it), donate it to the towns and cities for parks (why have a park where nobody goes?) or perhaps create a Exurb Museum or Theme Park (my favorite).

The most likely scenario is they will be left to sit vacant and increasingly valueless. Exurban governments will be hurt by the loss in tax revenue and ultimately have to find ways reclaim the land just to pay for the massive utility systems built to accomodate the new settlements. Or developers will be forced to foot the bill and go out of business in the process (like they’re not going out of business right now due to the housing crisis). No matter how you cut it, it’s not pretty in Exurbia. If there is a silver lining, it’s that high gas prices might actually slow down or stop the senseless construction of houses on speculation by visionless developers who never cared about communities- only cash. Ironically, the only thing that can save their investments now is not cash but community. And there’s no way exurbans are going to stay for their neighbors. After all, that’s why they live in those areas in the first place: to get away from neighbors. If exurbans are any one thing, they are mobile.

So Chris Cannon finally got what he deserved and worked so hard for: losing his job in Congress. It’s another lesson of how arrogance, stupidity, selfishness and greed finally catches up with people like him. The problem is Congress and politics are stilled filled with people like Chris Cannon. And there’s no reason to believe that Jason Chaffetz will be any different. Why should we believe Chaffetz can do anything about high gas prices? Why do we want him to do anything about high gas prices? It wasn’t Congress who made gas prices high. We did. Consumers and their ever-growing appetite for cheap gasoline are now really paying the price. President Bush and vice-bonehead Cheney, with all their experience and buddies in the oil industry, can’t lower prices. Jason Chaffetz won’t even get the south surburban, pickup truck, six kids per family crowd a coupon.

What Chaffetz, who will likely win in November, must be more than anything is not like Chris Cannon. And that means being environmentally conscious, less beholding to the same special interests that jacked up the gas prices Chaffetz now believes he can do something about, and more responsive to Utah voters who want something done about their bad air, cutting energy costs and saving our environment by aiding renewable energy, corporate and federal abuse of our public lands and a war that draining our country’s resources while our president plays out the string.

That’s a tall order. And from what I’ve seen, I don’t think he can do it. Why? The same people who have Chris Cannon by the short and curlies are the same people who will soon own Jason Chaffetz. Oil, car companies, mining interests, defense contractors. Nothing will change. And Chaffetz knows it.

Wendell Berry, the great environmental economist, wrote in a famous essay about how consumerism, capitalism, environmental destruction and globalism have converged to create a perfect storm of human crisis he calls “total economy”: everything we do is done for money, jobs and pleasure without regard for the consequences. We’ve seen what this policy does not only to local economies (Wal-Mart, Disney and the ascent of the supercorporations while America’s downtowns empty). We’ve also seen what it does to our environment (Midwest floods, wildfires, Katrina, etc. are all caused by human greed and ignorance).

What we don’t see, and what the consumer-based corporate media won’t tell you, is what “total economy” does to the human spirit: another cornerstone of Berry’s essay which appears in Barry Lopez’ excellent anthology of environmental writing “The Future of Nature.” However, if there is one major indicator, it’s polls of consumer confidence. The latest one shows consumer confidence dipping sharply again. But we should not make the mistake- or take the corporate media bait- in believing this is just an anomaly or that Americans are totally into total economy. It’s a major indicator of a seismic shift in our thinking that we can spend our way into wealth and that true happiness is measured by how many things we have stuffed in our closets and garages.

Just as Bush said after 9/11 that we should help America by going shopping, so most Americans have been led to believe that buying stuff is what makes America strong- when exactly the opposite was true. Now, faced with deepening gasoline, housing, environmental, poor leadership and war crises, we are starting to see that “total economy” is killing America, making China, Saudi Arabia and our other competitors rich and powerful and taking us down a path that will take a very long time to get off- if ever.

But it’s already started.