New Geography

Category: Politics

  • Nuts for ACORN

    In about a year, the next U.S. Census will be upon us. However, one group participating in the survey is already driving some lawmakers nuts.

    In February, The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) signed a partnership with the Census Bureau to “assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States.”

    While the bureau currently has partnerships with more than 250 national organizations from the NAACP to TARGET, ACORN’s past allegations of fraud have raised the most concern.

    The organization – a non-partisan group of low-and moderate-income people – came under fire in 2007, when several paid employees were alleged to have created more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In 2008, another worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for creating 29 phony registration forms.

    The census is used to “determine distribution of taxpayer money through grants and appropriations and the appointment of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives” and lawmakers do not want any fraudulent computing.

    Spokespeople for both ACORN and the Census Bureau have refuted any suggestion that “any group will fraudulently and unduly influence the results of the census.”

    Though doubts still remain, the bureau is now focusing on the more than 1 million applicants for 140,000 census taker positions, which is where assistance from organizations such as ACORN becomes needed.

    Government accountability is under attack – as it was during the Bush administration, so shall it be under Obama. Given ACORN’s past reputation, confidence in the census itself could come up for question.

  • Anger Could Make Us Stronger

    The notion of a populist outburst raises an archaic vision of soot-covered industrial workers waving placards. Yet populism is far from dead, and represents a force that could shape our political future in unpredictable ways.

    People have reasons to be mad, from declining real incomes to mythic levels of greed and excess among the financial elite. Confidence in political and economic institutions remains at low levels, as does belief in the future.

    The critical issue facing the new administration is finding useful ways to channel this disenchantment. We know popular anger can also be channeled in unproductive ways. It can serve to further a narrow political agenda – for example, Karl Rove’s cynical exploitation of the “culture wars” – or stir up a witch hunt against both real and perceived “threats,” as occurred during the McCarthy era. If this were Russia, there would be show trials and executions. We do not and should not do that – but we can still use populist anger to reshape our nation and make it stronger.

    In this respect, the Obama administration, criticized justifiably as too radical on some issues, has been far too timid. It has squandered much of the stimulus effort on maintaining fundamentally corrupt, even sociopathic, institutions like AIG or Citigroup. By taking direction from establishmentarians like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, one of the original architects of the Bush financial bailouts, the current administration has seemed as complicit in condoning and even rewarding Wall Street’s transgressions as the last one.

    Populist rage creates the political support for taking far bolder steps against Wall Street. A good first step would be to allow the TARP-backed giant banks to come under some sort of federal control, or bankruptcy process, effectively wiping out the holdings of the financial malefactors and decimating any hopes for future bonuses. The public could then sell the remaining assets to the many well-run community and regional banks that invest in local businesses as opposed to the arcane paper favored by the Masters of the Universe.

    Radical financial reforms represent only part of the opportunity. China is using its stimulus to increase its competitiveness globally. So far, the Obama administration’s economic strategy, if it has one, has been selling the public on the chimera that highly subsidized “green jobs” and good intentions will save the economy. It has also rewarded what my old teacher Michael Harrington called “the social-industrial complex,” the massively growing education, health and social-service bureaucracy. President Obama needs to spend less time in photo ops at “green” factories and figure out how to drive the transformation of whole industries, like autos, steel, electronics and aerospace.

    In this sense, of course, the New Deal – particularly the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps – provides some models. These programs used the unemployed to create new dams, electrical-transmission systems and bridges that boosted the nation’s productive power. Critically, such a program would target blue-collar workers – mostly male and heavily minority – hardest hit in the recession. As conservatives rightly note, the New Deal construction projects did not end the Depression, but they did give people purpose and skills as well as hope, while leaving us with a remarkable legacy of productive structures that inspire us with their affirmation of our national destiny.

    Sadly, the political operatives running the White House today may prefer to use the popular mood primarily to service their key political constituencies and boost their poll ratings. If they do so, they will have squandered a unique opportunity to implement changes that would benefit both the country and the middle class for decades to come. Public outrage is a terrible thing to waste.

    This article originally appeared at Newsweek.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Enough “Cowboy” Greenhouse Gas Reduction Policies

    The world has embarked upon a campaign to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This is a serious challenge that will require focused policies rooted in reality. Regrettably, the political process sometimes falls far short of that objective. This is particularly so in the states of California and Washington, where ideology has crowded out rational analysis and the adoption of what can only be seen as reckless “cowboy” policies.

    Last year, California enacted Senate Bill 375, which seeks to reduce future GHG emissions by encouraging higher urban population densities and forcing more development to be near transit stations. Yet there is no objective analysis to suggest that such an approach will work. Of course, there are the usual slogans about people giving up their cars for transit and walking to work, but this occurs only in the minds of the ideologues. The forecasting models have been unable to predict any substantial reduction in automobile use, and, more importantly, such policies have never produced such a result.

    In fact, higher densities are likely to worsen the quality of life in California, while doing little, if anything to reduce GHG emissions. California already has the densest urban areas (which includes core cities and surrounding suburbs) in the United States. The Los Angeles urban area is 30 percent more dense than the New York urban area. The San Francisco and San Jose urban areas are also denser than the New York urban area. Sacramento stands as the 10th most dense among the 38 urban areas over 1,000,000 population, while Riverside-San Bernardino ranks 12th and San Diego ranks 13th.

    This high density creates the worst traffic congestion in the nation. The slower stop and go operation of cars in traffic congestion materially intensifies local air pollution and increases health hazards. It also consumes more gasoline, which increases GHG emissions. Finally, California’s prescriptive land use regulations have destroyed housing affordability. By the early 1990s, land use regulation had driven prices up well beyond national levels relative to incomes, according to Dartmouth’s William Fischell. Over the next decade the rationing effect of California’s excessive land use restrictions tripled house prices relative to incomes, setting up the mortgage meltdown and all that has followed in its wake.

    The implementation of Senate Bill 375’s provisions seems likely to make things worse. California’s urban areas already have plenty of dense “luxury” housing, much of which is now empty or is now converted from condos to rentals. Wherever they are clustered, particularly outside traditional urban centers like San Francisco, such areas experience intense traffic congestion, with all the resultant negative impact on both people and the environment.

    Yet despite the problems seen in California, the ideological plague has spread to Washington state. Last year the Washington legislature enacted a measure (House Bill 2815) that requires reductions in driving per capita, for the purpose of GHG emission reduction. By 2050, driving per capita is supposed to be halved. This year there was a legislative proposal, House Bill 1490, that would have mandated planning for 50 housing units to the acre within one-half mile of light rail stations. This would have amounted to a density of nearly 50,000 per square mile, 3 times the city of San Francisco, 7 times the density of the city of Seattle and more than that of any of more than 700 census tracts (small districts) in the three-county Seattle area. Areas around stations would be two-thirds as dense as Hong Kong, the world’s most dense urban area.
    The density requirement has since been amended out of the bill, but the fact that it made it so far in the legislature indicates how far the density mania has gone. The bill appears unlikely to pass this year.

    Extending the density planning regime is not likely to help the people on the ground, much less reduce GHGs. Seattle already has a housing affordability problem, which is not surprising given its prescriptive planning policies (called growth management or smart growth). Theo Eicher of the University of Washington has documented the close connection between Seattle’s regulatory structures and its house price increases.

    As in California, Seattle house prices rose dramatically during the housing bubble, nearly doubling relative to incomes. At the same time, much of the debate on House Bill 1490 has been over affordable housing. Yet there has been virtually no recognition of connection between Seattle’s low level of housing affordability and its destructive land use regulations. House Bill 1490 would have only made things worse, and still could. Proponents have indicated that they have not given up.

    The theory behind House Bill 1490 parallels that of California’s SB 375. It assumes high densities would significantly reduce driving and attract people to transit. As in California, however, this is based upon wishful thinking, and has no basis in reality. No urban area in the developed world has produced a material decline in automobile use through such policies.

    Regrettably, the special interest groups behind the California and Washington initiatives appear more interested in forcing people to change their lifestyles than in reducing GHG emissions. This is demonstrated by the Washington driving reduction requirement.

    A good faith attempt to reduce GHG emissions from cars would have targeted GHG emissions from cars, not the use of cars. The issue is GHG emission reduction, not behavior modification, and the more the special interests target people’s behavior, the clearer it becomes how facetious they are about reducing GHG emissions.

    Technology offers the most promise. Already the technology is available to substantially reduce GHG emissions by cars, without requiring people to change their lifestyles. Hybrids currently being sold obtain nearly three times the miles per gallon of the average personal vehicle (cars, personal trucks and sport utility vehicles) fleet. And that is before the promising developments in decades to come in alternative fuels and improved vehicle technology. In addition, the rapid increase in people working at home – a number on track to pass that of transit users by 2015 – would also represent a clear way to reduce GHG emissions.

    Finally it is not certain that suburban housing produces higher GHG emissions per capita than high rise urban development. The only comprehensive research on the subject was conducted in Australia and found that, generally, when all GHG emissions are considered, suburban areas emitted less per capita than higher density areas. This is partially because dense urbanites tend to live a high consumption lifestyle, by eating out at restaurants serving exotic foods, having summer homes and extensive travel. It is also because high density living requires energy consumption that does not occur in lower density suburbs, such as electricity for elevators, common area lighting, and highly consumptive central air conditioning, heating, water heating and ventilation, as Energy Australia research indicates.

    Further, tomorrow’s housing will be more carbon friendly than today’s. Japan has already developed a prototype 2,150 square foot, single story suburban carbon neutral house.

    Much of the anti-suburban and anti-car sloganeering ignores these developments and generally assumes a static world. If the world were static, we would still be living in caves.

    The California and Washington initiatives were not based upon any comprehensive research. There were no reports estimating the tons of GHG emissions that were to be reduced. There was no cost analysis of how much each ton removed would cost. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that the maximum amount necessary to accomplish deep reversal of GHG concentrations is between $20 and $50 per ton. Responsible policy making would have evaluated these issues. (It seems highly improbable that Seattle’s currently under-construction University light rail extension remotely matches this standard, with is capital and operating costs per annual patron of more than $10,000.)

    The price that society can afford to pay for GHG emission reduction is considerably less today than it was just six months ago. The history of the now departed communist world demonstrates that poorer societies simply do not place a high priority on environmental protection. That is not surprising, since people address their basic human needs before broader objectives, such as a better environment. That may not comport with the doctrines of political correctness, but it is reality.

    In such times, communities should be careful not to undertake policies based on assumptions or the preferences of those planners, architects and ideologues who seem to hold suburbs and personal mobility in such contempt that they would not be satisfied even if they emitted no GHGs. These radical motives are inappropriate. “Cowboy” policies enacted ad hoc at the bequest of ideologues openly disdainful of our basic lifestyles threaten not only the future prosperity of a society but our most reasonable path to long-term environmental improvement including reducing GHG emissions.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • The Continuing Debate on AIG

    The House of Representatives is debating a 90 percent tax on executive bonus payments made to companies receiving bailout funds. Anything they pass will still have to get through the Senate and past the President’s desk. They are “upset about something they already did,” according to Dan Lungren (R-CA). Congress ignored the opportunity to deal with this back when you and me and 100,000 other voters were telling them not to pass the bailout legislation.

    Executive compensation schemes at American International Group (AIG) have been under investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo since last fall. He is ramping up the investigation now, given the news over the weekend of new bonus disbursements, to determine if the bonus contracts are unenforceable for fraud under New York law. AIG agreed with Cuomo last October not to use their own “deferred compensation pool” to pay bonuses – and then bargained with executives to make the payments anyway! AIG execs got contracts in early 2008 that guaranteed their bonuses – information that former Treasury Secretary Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Geithner (former President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank) had when they initiated the original bailout.

    It’s pretty amazing 1) that taxpayers are bailing out a company that’s under criminal investigation; 2) that Treasury didn’t negotiate compensation schemes before they wrote the first check (like they do with auto workers?); and 3) that the bonuses are a bigger story than the fact that more than one-third of the bailout money was shipped overseas.

  • We Need a New Oracle

    Warren Buffett was on CNBC for three hours on March 9, 2009, dishing out his wisdom. All this fanfare despite having lost $24 billion in value last year, and handing the title of Richest Man in the World over to Bill Gates. Buffett made multiple references to “war” in describing the current financial crisis.

    There are several problems with Buffett’s comparison of the current state of the economy to war, as pointed out in this story in the Omaha World-Herald, which ran the day after the interview. What we are seeing is less like war – in which an outside enemy attacks you – and more like arson, except the people who burned down the house are now collecting the insurance too!

    Warren Buffett – the widely revered Oracle of Omaha, where I live – is one of those who built the boom in the capital markets and are benefiting from the bust. No surprise then that Buffett whose primary business vehicle is Berkshire Hathaway, a financial holding company, supports the bailout of financial institutions. Their business includes, among others, property and casualty insurance and a financial holding company. When Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) told me that he talked with Warren before voting for the first bailout package, I button-holed him after lunch and gave him an ear full.

    Of course Buffett was in favor of the bailout – his companies directly benefited as did the investments made by his companies. He put $5 billion into Goldman Sachs preferred stock with a 10% dividend – a substantially better rate of return than the US government got on our $10 billion bailout, er, I mean “investment.” Berkshire Hathaway was the largest shareholder in American Express Co. when they received $3.4 billion from Uncle Sam.

    Buffett appeared on CNBC a year ago (March 3, 2008). At that time he was forthcoming about the risks Berkshire Hathaway was taking. He told CNBC at the time that he had “written 206 transactions in the last three weeks” which were default swaps on municipal bonds – the financing used by cities and states to fund everything from building schools to general obligations.

    Buffett bragged that “the municipality has to quit paying” before any losses would have to be covered. This gives him incentive for another payout from Uncle Sam in addition to the Wall Street bailout – he also has incentive to support the stimulus package. If the cities and states default on their debt, then Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway companies) would be on the hook to make good on the full value of the bonds. At that point in March 2008, after just 3 weeks of investing, Buffett said he made $69 million in premiums for guaranteeing payment on $2 billion of municipal bonds. The primary insurer received about $20 million, an amount significantly less but that carries more risk. If that doesn’t seem to make sense, then you understand – the pricing of risk and premiums did not make sense. This systematic irrationality was also a contributing factor to the current financial mess.

    The scheme of buying and selling bond payment guarantees is very much dependent on rising asset prices (and no recession), just like any Ponzi scheme. Describing his investment strategy in March 2008, Buffett clearly said that what he and the other insurers in this market are “hoping for is new money.” He even admitted that getting new money was preventing he and others in the market from having to “totally face(d) up to the mistakes that they’ve made.”

    By now, Bernie Madoff has shown you how a Ponzi Scheme falls apart in a down market. In the 2008 interview, Buffett gave us a preview of what keeps him awake at night. Cities and states don’t go broke very often, but when they do “it could be contagious.” Luckily for Buffett, the Congress – “the best Congress that money can buy”, according to Sen. Kennedy – voted to send “stimulus” money to the cities and states.

    In fact, Buffett wouldn’t have to pay on any of those bonds unless the primary bond insurer went broke, too. That primary bond insurer is Ambac Financial Group, Inc. Ambac is the first to pay in the event of default on the municipal bonds that Buffett is guaranteeing. If any of the bonds go bad, Ambac has to pay the bondholders. If Ambac got into financial trouble Buffett said he would “be out trying to help them raise money” – otherwise Berkshire Hathaway would have to pay off the bonds. Now, in March 2009, Buffett talks about the economy going over a cliff while Ambac teeters on the edge of junk bond status. When it falls, it could take Berkshire Hathaway with it. The table below shows what happened to Ambac’s credit rating between Buffett’s two appearances on CNBC.


    Timeline of Ambac Credit Rating Slide

    Date Event
    3/3/2008 Buffett appears on CNBC discussing investment scheme relative to Ambac
    3/12/2008 Moody’s confirms Ambac’s Aaa rating; changes outlook to negative
    4/24/2008 Moody’s reiterates negative outlook on Ambac’s Aaa rating following earnings announcement
    5/13/2008 Moody’s says worsening second lien RMBS could impact financial guarantor ratings
    6/4/2008 Moody’s reviews Ambac’s Aaa rating for possible downgrade
    6/19/2008 Moody’s downgrades Ambac to Aa3; outlook is negative
    9/18/2008 Moody’s places ratings of Ambac on review for possible downgrade
    11/5/2008 Moody’s downgrades Ambac to Baa1; outlook is developing
    3/3/2009 Moody’s reviews Ambac’s ratings for possible downgrade
    3/9/2009 Buffett appears on CNBC; no discussion of Ambac

    Acting selfish and self-serving is what got us into this mess in the first place. We’ve been witness to bloated executive compensation in the face of lousy corporate performance. We’ve seen mega-billionaires living lavish lifestyles for years on the proceeds of Ponzi schemes and fraud. Maybe it’s time for a new Oracle, in Omaha or elsewhere, because this one has been giving us bad advice.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets.

  • Blagojevich Misdoings Could Have National Fallout

    Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s arrest, impeachment and removal from office assured his place as another famous name in our state’s corruption hall of disrepute. But it turns out the selling of President Obama’s Senate Seat was only a minor part of Blagojevich’s misdoings – and some of this could have greater national political fall-out than is commonly imagined.

    As the Justice Department looks at Blagojevich’s machinations, the scope is likely to widen. Operation Board Games, the formal name of Justice Department’s investigation of Blagojevich, is about more than just Blago’s seat-selling or about Democratic Party political fundraiser Tony Rezko shaking down individuals for campaign contributions.

    Perhaps the most fertile ground for the investigation centers on the awarding of a gambling license in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, as The Chicago Tribune reported in 2005. Because of the negative attention drawn to placing a casino located in the Chicago Mob-linked suburb of Rosemont, Blagojevich needed to make the situation look more respectable.

    So who was brought in to try and make Rosemont look acceptable? None other than Eric Holder, the current newly installed Attorney General. Rosemont didn’t get the casino because of pressure applied by former FBI agent Jim Wagner on the Illinois Gaming board. Wagner is the guy who publicly raised the question of Eric Holder’s connection with Blagojevich.

    And there’s more to come:

    A day before his arrest, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was hit with a sweeping federal subpoena seeking eight years of calendars, correspondence, e-mails, logs, notes and other records involving everyone from his wife to Chicago Tribune owner Sam Zell

    The “everyone” includes Valerie Jarrett and David Axerod, individuals who are very close to President Obama.Tony Rezko appears to be a link between Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama. All of this could get pretty messy before it’s all done.

  • I’ll have a $14,000 vacation with my lobbyists, please.

    Democratic lawmakers from California recently took a break in the midst of “intense state budget negotiations” to travel up to a wine-country lodge complete with gourmet food, rooms, and cocktails with a trio of interests footing the $14,000 bill.

    At the time of the retreat, the Consumer Attorneys of California (who, along with labor unions, had been pushing to roll back some labor rules) the California Professional Firefighters (seeking to protect funding for fire safety programs) and the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council (lobbying for greater roles for private contractors in state construction) all had strong interest in the proceedings.

    The getaway came a day after Gov. Schwarzenegger declared a state of fiscal emergency and ordered the Legislature to discuss a series of proposals to plug a projected $42-bilion budget gap.

    For the most part, each group had its interests protected in the budget package passed in February – though each group denied the retreat had anything to do with the budget.

    Such extravagance gifted to lawmakers is not uncommon; groups with business before the state commonly bankroll such outings. Dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse with a $144 price tag, tickets to Disneyland, and $13,211 trip to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, among many others, were revealed last week in documents filed by lawmakers.

    Indecent lobbying goes down best with a vintage cabernet.

  • Different Shades of Green

    Last month marked the 15th anniversary of the settlement of Plotkin vs. General Electric, the landmark “greenwashing” lawsuit I filed in 1993. At the time, GE was misleading consumers by selling phony lookalike energy efficient light bulbs that were in fact just old fashioned incandescent wolves in green packaging.

    I took no money from the case. But I required G.E. to make labeling changes and to pony up $3.25 million dollars in consumer refunds and donations to environmental and public service groups. The labeling changes made it easier for the manufacturers of real energy efficient light bulbs, which were just then entering the marketplace, to distinguish their products on the shelves. Plotkin vs. GE also more firmly established the ability of environmental activists to turn to the courts when state and federal government agencies fail to punish greenwashing. The settlement we achieved created a powerful deterrent that continues to produce benefits to this day.

    In the meantime, though, greenwashing has become a virtual industry in the political and policy worlds. Take, for example, the growing push for economically regressive and environmentally problematic HOT (high occupancy toll) lanes. HOT lanes are toll lanes on public highways. Prices are set dynamically so that HOT lanes keep moving even if all the other lanes are stuck. Governor Schwarzenegger and many leading Democrats favor the idea and use it to paint themselves green. HOT lanes are also popular with many affluent motorists who love the idea of driving their SUVs in the carpool lane for what amounts to pocket change. It’s an odd alliance.

    Unfortunately, support for HOT lanes is also becoming a litmus test issue for some environmental groups when they evaluate political candidates, apparently without much thought about the economic consequences, particularly for the poor.

    HOT lane backers push their plan by claiming that only a limited number of lanes will be involved, typically just one to start. But in Europe, where many of these experiments began, “congestion management” programs have since morphed into systems that essentially allow rich drivers to hog public roads. Give the upper crust the fast lane and, it turns out, pretty soon they want the whole road.

    HOT lanes are an example of one of the worst forms of regressive taxation imaginable. Like all regressive taxes, they exact a higher percentage of income from the poor. But in this case, they also tax the very mobility of the poor, making it harder for them to commute, including to work and school, which can effectively lock people into low end jobs and poverty that they might otherwise escape.

    What little thought the proponents of HOT lanes have given to their impact on the poor appears to be in the category of “let them eat cake.” One widely-cited report recommending HOT lanes even dismissed concerns they were unfair to the poor by noting that service workers can use the lanes to get to their clients’ houses more quickly:

    “… studies of Orange County’s SR-91 show that the variable-priced toll lanes are not used exclusively by the wealthy. The ability to save time and reduce uncertainty confers substantial benefits to all drivers, including service professionals who can make more service calls…”

    In the San Francisco Bay Area, Caltrans and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission are fast-tracking a HOT lane implementation plan that could be devastating for students at area community colleges. At De Anza College in Cupertino, California, for example, more than 10,000 students commute to school each day. For many, this is the only reasonable path towards upward mobility. I know. Thirty years ago, I was one of those students, only to return more recently to serve on the college district’s board of trustees.

    A proposed fee of $5 a day per trip on Highway 85 during peak rush hour, as envisioned, would boost a typical De Anza College commuter student’s expenses by as much as $100 a month. That burden is sure to grow over time. Escaping poverty is often a game of inches. Our surveys indicate that thousands of our students live at or near the poverty level. Each additional expense imposed by our government makes a high quality college education less accessible.

    HOT lane proponents say that over the long run the impact on the poor will be positive because the tolls will be used to improve public transit, which will benefit less affluent citizens and increase use of public transportation.

    But this is out of touch with the realities of life in places like Silicon Valley, where the automobile is still the most practical way for many people to get to work. What may work for investment bankers taking transit to downtown San Francisco doesn’t work for a student who lives in Mountain View and needs to get to Cupertino and then to a job in Redwood City each day.

    What’s more, the promised transportation improvements may take decades to implement and may never meet the real world transit needs of working students, not to mention those who also have to stop to pick up their children, get groceries or complete errands on the same trip.

    But one thing is for sure. While we wait for those HOT lane financed transit improvements to kick in, a generation, maybe more, will find it harder to attend school or get to their jobs.

    Global warming is a very real problem. But it can and must be addressed in far better and more equitable ways. Those less regressive ideas include higher taxes on gas guzzlers, road electrification, remote sensing (“by wire”) vehicles, increased subsidies and public support infrastructure for carpools, home-based work and or possibly even a boost in industrial levies based on employee commute profiles. All of these advances will require government action and a communal effort. But each of these more significant steps are far less likely to occur if rich divers can easily get wherever they want to go quickly at the expense of everyone else. That’s the road the current elitist HOT lanes proposal takes us down.

    It also raises the question of what comes next. Will this same crowd of economic elitists also want to make public parks and beaches off limits to all but the affluent, too? After all, those are also getting pretty crowded. Or we will defend a more traditional American value: public spaces, including roads, are created, maintained, protected and improved by the public to benefit the public.

    When General Electric put phony energy efficient light bulbs on stores shelves two decades ago, taking the company to court was the smart way to fight back. Unfortunately, there is no court we can petition to ensure that regressive tax policies aren’t greenwashed in ways that trample the rights of the poor, community college students and working people. But there is at least one place we can fight for the smarter, more effective and more equitable environmental policies we need: the state legislature.

    Hal Plotkin is a veteran Silicon Valley journalist and commentator, a founding editor of Marketplace on public radio, and the founder of the Center for Media Change, Inc., a Palo Alto-based 501(c)3 non-profit that enables crowd-funding of high-quality journalism.

  • Proposed Obama Cuts Will Impair Maintenance and Expansion of Nuclear Energy

    The days of the nu-cu-ler presidency may be over, but nuclear energy continues to be a hot-button issue, even if pronunciation isn’t the problem.

    As it stands, President Obama plans to “slash the budgets of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the national nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada,” reports eco-watcher Paul Taylor.

    The 104 nuclear power plants spread across the United State currently supply around 20% of the nation’s power and have eliminated 8.7 trillion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

    Technological improvements in nuclear facilities have also led to a typical power plant operating at 90% annual efficiency – whereas wind and solar power generally operate at 25% efficiency.

    The U.S. may operate about a quarter of the 430 nuclear power plants worldwide, but “nuclear energy” continues to be a polarizing subject – safety may have improved, but Chernobyl and Three Mile Island continue to be associated with the energy’s potential hazards.

    Despite the memories of Karen Silkwood, Americans appear to be increasing their approval of nuclear power. The number of American citizens in favor of expanding nuclear power is up to 50% in 2007 from a 44% approval rating in 2001.

    The energy harvested from one pound of uranium fuel is equivalent to 1.3 millions pounds of coal energy. The decisions Obama will make about the nuclear program will undoubtedly be closely watched by those concerned with stable, domestic energy supplies as well as GHG emissions.

  • Is Obama’s Urban Focus Bad News for the Rest of the Countryside?

    To much of the media, Barack Obama is the ultimate dream president, a sophisticated urbanite whose roots lie in top-tier academia and big-city politics. This asset could also become a glaring weakness, blinding him to the fundamental aspirations for smaller places and self-government that have long animated the American experience.

    It has been a half-century since have we seen a presidential inner circle so identified with our densest urban centers. The three most recent Democratic presidents — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — all had substantial roots in small-town America that also helped them understand the aspirations of middle-class suburban and exurban voters.

    In contrast, this is an administration steeped in the mystique of big cities. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is a tough-guy player from the variously effective and consistently corrupt Chicago city machine. The members of the Cabinet and top-tier apparatus are longtime residents of such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and, of course, Chicago.

    As the continuing Roland Burris saga reveals, the Chicago connection, in particular, seems likely to wreak continued damage. Chicago’s corruption could run like a sore through this administration, much like Arkansas with the Clintons. But rather than deal with almost laughable hillbillies, we may witness the exposure of some of the toughest, and brazen, baddies in American politics.

    Yet for the most part, the big media have been too captivated by the president’s urbane mystique to delve too deeply into the Chicago morass. Largely denizens of big cities, the top media generally embrace the notion that dense urban places are inherently better, more efficient, culturally and environmentally sound than less glamorous, more spread-out places.

    You can see this worldview almost daily in The New York Times or, more substantially, in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic, where writers often like to envision an American future bright for top-tier cities and pretty bleak for everyone else.

    Given the composition of the president’s inner circle, one can imagine such views are widely accepted at the highest levels. Over the coming years, this could precipitate a policy agenda that, though perhaps well intentioned, could work to the disadvantage in the suburbs, exurbs and small towns where most Americans live. Their policies — particularly the new taxes on the so-called $250K-a-year rich — may not even work so much to the advantage of middle-class urbanites; but this may take time to unfold.

    More important, Obama’s urban policy also marks a critical shift from the traditional American preference for decentralization of power — including at the city level — to one that embraces ever greater concentration. It could also mark a public embrace of hierarchy every bit as serious — and perhaps less reversible — than has occurred in the relatively unregulated marketplace environment of the past quarter century.

    The most recent Pew study confirms that some 77 percent of Americans prefer to live in suburbs, small towns or the countryside. But this prevailing preference for deconcentration disturbs many urban planners and policymakers, including some close to the Obama team. A key transition adviser of urban policy, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz, has been pushing the notion of “regionalism” under which there would be a major shift of power away from individual towns, counties and even urban neighborhoods to mega-regional agencies.

    Katz, like many regionalists, seeks to diminish such local interests — which they fear as too parochial and insufficiently enlightened. His views about small-town politics are scathing as evidenced in an anti-Sarah Palin screed, published in The New Republic last October, revealingly titled “Village Idiocy.”

    To be sure, regional agencies sometimes are useful, for example, in the management of air and water basins. But almost automatically regionalism favors more powerful entrenched interests over smaller communities and businesses. For example, in Southern California, the vast majority of the population lives in suburban cities, but power at the mega-regional agencies — such as the Southern California Association of Governments — usually reliably reflects the interests of large developers, public employee unions, big architects and planners.

    Speaking in Florida recently, the president denounced “sprawl,” saying its days were now “over.” Although hardly a declaration of war on suburbia per se, his comments thrilled those offended by low-density suburbs and who want government to promote ever denser urban development — even if often opposed by grass-roots urbanites.

    The emerging centralizing impulse can be seen in the stimulus, with unprecedented funds for light-rail projects and high-speed rail. Although such projects may seem logical in a few concentrated cities like Washington or New York, they seem poorly suited for most American cities and the vast majority of suburbs. In such places, a more practical, market-friendly way to curb greenhouse gases would be to promote decentralization of work, the creation of flexible low-cost transit and providing incentives for home-based business.

    Over time, such tendencies could present potential dangers for the president. Despite the preferences of most people around the president, and perhaps he himself, nearly 80 percent of Americans consistently report they favor living in less dense places and overwhelmingly prefer single-family homes. They may also be reluctant to surrender ever more control over their daily lives to either distant regional authorities or the federal apparatus. Ultimately, the administration may be forced to choose between acting on its urban mystique and maintaining its political majority.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.