How the New CAFE Standards Could Help Detroit

Despite the dire warnings about the end of prosperity as we know it, there are reasons why auto executives joined Obama for his announcement of new CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards. I describe some of them over at the Guardian:

As hard as it might be for free-market fundamentalists to understand, automakers have openly welcomed a consistent, predictable standard they can use for planning and developing their products.

I offer some reasons why U.S. automakers might actually benefit from taking the market for smaller, efficient cars seriously. Foreign makers have been encroaching on U.S. makers by first introducing reliable small cars, and then moving into more expensive lines:

After Japanese makers gained a foothold selling small, inexpensive cars to Americans, they leveraged their strength in that segment to introduce a wider range of products, until luxury brands like Lexus were seen as superior to their US counterparts.

It's hard to see why automakers shouldn't be able to meet the new standards. Even though engines have been getting more efficient, average fuel efficiency actually dropped over a twenty year period, due mostly to the sale of ever bulkier vehicles.

New Orleans, Drowning in the Sands of Time

After the PR offensive, what? Having disappeared from the headlines, New Orleans is dying of neglect. The Washington Post recites the sad litany of failure:

Some 250,000 devastated businesses have applied to SBA loans; only a couple hundred have been approved. Isn't that as lackadaisical a response as FEMA's? If these businesses can't get short-term loans, they're going to close up, and there go the jobs that might enable more folks to return.
Some 284,000 homes were destroyed by the hurricane. Some people got flood-insurance payments, while others in the same neighborhood were denied. Major portions of the area have no power, and the local electric utility is bankrupt. The health care system has been crippled, with only two hospitals partially reopened. The first regular public school reopened only yesterday. Some banks can't decide whether to rebuild. Companies like UPS and Burger King have jobs available, but few takers because there is no housing. Much of the $62 billion okayed by Congress remains unspent.

But there are signs of life emerging, like plants growing between the cracks of broken pavement. The Washington Post reports that New Orleans is offering free WiFi access in two neighborhoods starting today. Here we see the local digerati sitting on boxes outside a cafe. It is much easier (and cheaper) to create a WiFi network from scratch than it is to rebuild the the much less exciting infrastructure of roads, electricity, water, sewer and flood protection.

(1st photo: Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times)
(2nd photo: Eliot Kamenitz -- The Times-Picayune)

"The culture of unaccountability"

Over at TPM Cafe, Joe Wilson, husband of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, reminds us that the fuss over reporters Matt Cooper and Judith Miller is at it's core a question of government officials refusing to take responsibility for their actions:

The sentencing of Judith Miller to jail for refusing to disclose her sources is the direct result of the culture of unaccountability that infects the Bush White House from top to bottom. President Bush’s refusal to enforce his own call for full cooperation with the Special Counsel has brought us to this point. Clearly, the conspiracy to cover up the web of lies that underpinned the invasion of Iraq is more important to the White House than coming clean on a serious breach of national security. Thus has Ms Miller joined my wife, Valerie, and her twenty years of service to this nation as collateral damage in the smear campaign launched when I had the temerity to challenge the President on his assertion that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa.

Obama on Self and Nation

Ivo Daalder at TPM Cafe highlights Barack Obama's commencment speech at Knox College as part of a post on american exceptionalism:

And then America happened: A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form “a more perfect union” on this new frontier.

Obama turns from our past to our future and to the importance of participation in public life:

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It’s primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Obama's vision is of a nation continually reaching towards an ideal, where citizens enjoy autonomy in their own lives while they strive to improve the common good.