The Young Turks

I would love to see something like this but two problems come quickly to mind, to play devil's advocate and take the opposition position. Firstly, the ten trillion dollar national debt makes any huge spending program prohibitive costly and unpopular politically as it is financially. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, America is not the same nation it was 60 years ago, let alone 30 years ago. In the sixties, the youth movement was strong enough to not just dream together but to implement those solutions in reality. If not even solutions, take their woodstock versus ours. There's was put on on the fly by them for them. We copied it, not original, and it was MTV and corporate. But even in the sixties there was the disonance between the yippies and the establishment, not to mention differences between the black panther party and the rest of the yippies. But in the thirties and forties, you had a sense in America that there was a common purpose and a common unity. Sure, the reality is there were aging partiers from the lost generation more interested in cocaine and high balls that would stiff joe brother can you spare a dime quicker than your most hardened 80's wallstreet blow type. But just think about the idea of war rations, you think that could ever happen today?

The reality is that if America already had that mentality, we could just decide to stop driving, to stop speculating in the oil market, to buy american, to take cuts in union pay, in order to crush Opec, Japan, China and the Euro. The president would just tell Ford and GM that they had to stop making trucks and start making Japanese type hybrids and it would happen. When I say stop driving, American's have finally responded to high gas prices by moderating their driving habits, but what if for a day or a week or a month or a year or whatever it took, all non-essential traffic just stopped. What if only traffic related to business or emergencies or say school took place. And not gov't mandated, but everyone just decided to do it. And Rosie the Riveter told ya to get on the same page or else. And everyone got in line to toe the line. Forget about the implications for gas stations, auto repair shops even big box realtors (which are making a healthy profit from gas right now). Forget the implications on spending, consumer or otherwise. Even forget about the stress put on mass transit or a rise in deisel fuel costs associated or jet fuel similarly. It is moot because it couldn't happen to begin with because we can't make up our minds between Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the Simpsons and American Dad, Fiddy Cent and the Game, LeBron and Kobe, let alone important questions like raw skin or rubber, ribbed or lubricated, baseball or football, OKC Prairie Dogs or OKC Outlaws, or less filling vs. tastes great. Sure at base we're all just flip floppers and it is red state vs blue state and just a duality, this vs that.

I will say I do believe that the vast right wing conspiracy and the agenda of Karl Rove to build a permanent republican majority can be traced back to Hoover and the thirties and has been at odds with the New Deal ever since FDR implemented it successfully, and that the ten trillion dollar debt that they (RR and W) heaped upon us and future generations are related and directly related to why our hands are tied. It would be poetic justice if this somehow came back to bite them in the ass, but it seems we will forever pay for their mistakes.

The real problem with global warming is American driving habits. If America could somehow drastically moderate and change its behaviors in a relatively short period of time in an unmandated and spontanious fashion, many of the prescriptions for change would be unneeded. This being impossible, one plausible alternative would be a depression era style works program focusing on green technology and implementation, planting tree farms, wind farms and blanketing America with solar power to take it off of coal and natural gas. However, as stated above, the ten trillion dollar national debt coupled with the global war on terror and the pentagon budget makes this impossible. In the short term, market forces would predict a second great depression, collapse of the US airline marketplace, oil at 200 dollars a barrel, record foreclosures with no housing rebound which eventually effects US consumer spending, collapse of US industrial base and bankruptcies at Ford and GM, increased stress on the mass transit systems of local municipalities with an eroding tax base and higher cost structure, increased national debt, decreased tax revenue, decreased GNP and GDP, and probably cuts in social spending with maintained or increased pentagon and military budgets, increased percentage of yearly non-military budget on interest on interest, more and more crappy reality television and game shows, inflation, job losses, global warming, and God forbid, more Simon Cowell.

On the other hand, Toyota is already buying a closed truck plant and starting production of 46 mpg hybrid sedans in the US, there is increased pressure on their workers to unionize, the Cubbies are still in first heading into the all-star break and might win the series after a century (despite goats and ghosts in Wrigley) and there is an abundance of free porn online and free wifi seems to finally be catching on after a decade. Hmm, it's all good?!? Or is it?

Of course even if we could stop driving on the dime, it still wouldn't do anything about the national debt, and could even make the recession and bear markets worse, though they are probably inevitable. To say nothing of Simon.

I'm really a dreamer and an optomist though, and I want to believe that subsidized solar could somehow not only solve the war on terror by removing us from Iraq (war for oil) and cutting off funding to the Jihad states but take care of the national debt and shine your shoes to boot.

As much as I love King of the Hill, there is no way you're going to get me into a T Boone natural gas car. Does the truck come with a built in Grill Master, do you just roll up to the Nascar pregame, pop the hood and start roasting chicken without turning off the engine? How does that work exactly?