Author: joelado

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is known as ICE. It is time to break it up.

I am not going to go into an open borders argument. I am, however, going to go from the assumption that all the readers here believe that ripping children from their parents, when we had in place more civil approaches, is and was wrong. It is wrong on the level of being a huge human rights violation. If this is considered acceptable behavior in any way today, what then could be considered acceptable behavior tomorrow? What I am going to focus on is the institutionalized support structure that makes this fiasco possible.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. ~ John Stuart Mill 1867

The quote above or the more familiar one,  “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing,” which has been attributed to the likes of John F. Kennedy, Edmund Burke, R. Murray Hyslop, Charles F. Aked, as well as John Stuart Mill, in essence say the same thing. Evil will triumph if good men don’t do anything to stop it. What this quote lead me to think about was, what do we do if we are not standing by? Opposing evil is too broad an idea. We all would want to do that. But how?

Three years ago I discovered that my family’s linage on my mother’s side went back to our family that had been kicked out of Spain in 1492 for the crime of being Jews. This discovery internalized my feelings about the most easily identifiable evil event in recent history, the Holocaust. I asked myself, how does one attack evil like that? I never thought in my life I would ever see an inkling of something like that. It was a lesson of history well learned by everyone. Still, I thought about it a lot. I remember asking myself, why didn’t the rest of Germany simply refuse to do Hitler’s bidding? If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, then surely it would also be true that the only thing necessary for the failure of evil would be that no one participate in the demands of the evil ones. I thought about myself. I am no one special. My death would be insignificant outside of my loving family, but if I could refuse to turn the valves to the gas chambers, at least for a moment my life would have inconvenienced the evil doers before it was ended by the Nazis. They would have to choose someone else to turn the valves or they would need to turn the valves themselves. Then I thought that it wouldn’t be enough for me to just refuse to turn the valves, because I would simply be replaced. In order to not “do nothing” I would have to “do something” to insure that no one assigned to the task after me could just continue the evil. For the valve tender to the gas chamber he or she would have to break the valves so that they would remain closed. To do something would require not just an act of civil disobedience by refusing, but actively take part in sabotaging the mechanism of the evil apparatus.

At the moment of hearing that the Trump administration was wrenching children and babies out of the arms of mothers at the Mexican and U.S. border, I knew that this administration had crossed that line from being really bad to being downright evil. The heartache that I immediately felt for the mothers, the terror being experienced by the children, reminded me that the willingness to work with evil often times lives in the souls of ordinary people. The people of Germany, unfortunately, helped in the Holocaust. I guess it would simply be too much to ask that those employed by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Border Patrol to simply refuse to take children away from their mothers. The employees of these agencies probably run the full spectrum from evil racists, to people who are economically desperate, from people not aware of what they are being involved in, to the blinded followers of Donald Trump. What we do know is that ICE, the Border Patrol and other agencies involve with immigration are the mechanism that this administration has used to accomplish this evil task. ICE+ in this metaphor are the valves to the gas chambers in the Holocaust. To actively stop this particular evil and keep it from continuing on into the future we need to break the valve. We need to abolish ICE+.

Taking children is so wrong. Hearing them cry has disturbed me profoundly.
I want Trump and his supporters to be as haunted about this as I am.

It is such a simple idea I’m afraid to say it. I was trying to find an effective way to rattle the Trump administration without reverting to violence or directly harassing them. I think I have come up with an answer that will not only unnerve the Trump machine, but will get most Trump supporters to abandon him.

What I have done is to take the recording of crying children at a border that was posted by ProPublica on SoundCloud <https://soundcloud.com/propublica/audio-crying-children-inside-a-us-customs-and-border-protection-facility> and cut it up so that less of the adult voices and unrelated background noise is heard. I did this through GarageBand on my Mac. I then saved it to iTunes.

What I am thinking is this, we use the sound of the crying children’s voices when anyone of us comes across a Trump administration personality out in public. For example, play the crying from an audio file on your phone. Please, don’t do this in an, “in your face,” manor!

What I’m imagining is this. You are sitting at a restaurant and a Trump administration celeb is there eating or comes in after you. You call the crying border baby file up and play it on your smart phone’s speakers. Just a moment. If you happen to be seated relatively close to a Trump henchmen, you can play it for a few seconds and then stop. Do it just long enough so you know they heard it. If the restaurant approaches you about playing the recording, just apologize, claim it is your ringtone and stop it. You don’t have to bludgeon them with it. Be satisfied with the knowledge that if they heard the recording it will most likely ruin their meal and possibly their entire day. We want them to feel uncomfortable. I’ve used a restaurant example here but there are probably thousands of other places where these people are out in public that we can do this. The point is not to make them angry or allow them to play the victim card for being harassed, but rattle their psyche just enough to tweak their consciences.

I am sure that Donald Trump would probably loose control hearing the border children crying if he were in the middle of one of his hate speeches at one of his rallies. Just think of it, everywhere he goes he will hear the sound of the very children his policies made cry. It will haunt his dreams. Furthermore, just imagine being a Trump supporter and hearing the cries of babies everywhere he goes. You can also play it at Trump supporter gatherings, in front of Trump signs, hotels, golfing establishments, buildings and resorts. I can’t imagine anyone would ever want to be associated with the man who is associated with all that crying. Eventually the people who have buried the good in them selves deep inside to support Trump will turn on him. For the others it will take the pro-Trump wind out of their sails.

What I like most about this is that it is not violent. It is not caustic. It is not terribly loud. It is not even that rude. Yet it is very compelling and very disruptive. I can’t imagine Sarah Huckabee Sander wanting to stay on with Trump always hearing crying babies everywhere she goes. This may even reach others in the administration like Kirstjen Nielsen if she has any kind of soul. But most of all it will reach all the fence sitters who have supported Trump in the past.

I know this recording has a strong effect on Trump supporters. I witnessed a neighbor of mine, who had displayed a Trump sign on his house since the election finally take it down when the recording of the crying children came out on the news. If all of us, saying nothing, would play the voices of the crying children taken from their mothers at the border when ever Trump or any of his evil bootlickers are out in public, I strongly believe this could finally bring down this disgrace of a Presidency.

Tesla Supercharger

The problem with DC fast charging is that there are three standards in the US, CHAdeMO, which is what most Japanese brand vehicles use, the Society of Automotive Engineers standard called the CCS (Combined Charging System also known as SAE Combo plug), which is considered the US and European standard, and the Tesla Supercharger system.

In my previous blog “The 200-mile Paradigm,” I discussed how the 200-mile range electric vehicle revises the charging infrastructure needs significantly downward where only around 2900 well placed quick charging sites can meet nearly all of the charging needs for the entire United States. This was important because with nearly all automakers coming out with base model electric vehicles with 200-mile range most charging would take place at home and the only need for charging away from home would be traveling across country or traveling to places where either the round trip or the destination was over the vehicle’s 200-mile range. Having slow level 2 charging stations all over the place, as would be needed with the current low range EV model, wasn’t necessary since 200 miles of range would be more than the daily average for nearly all drivers. With AAA’s finding that on average Americans only drive about 32 miles a day, the 200-mile base range of the new EVs would be over six times that average.

The problem with DC fast charging is that there are three standards in the US, CHAdeMO, which is what most Japanese brand vehicles use, the Society of Automotive Engineers standard called the CCS (Combined Charging System also known as SAE Combo plug), which is considered the US and European standard, and the Tesla Supercharger system.

Tesla, since it’s vehicles have much larger battery capacities, needed a system that was much more powerful then the other two standards that were largely championed by the major automakers. The other two standards, CHAdeMO and CCS (SAE Combo), were fine for the smaller batteries before the 200-mile ranging EV paradigm, but now the major automakers are realizing that their championed systems would take much longer to charge in the new reality of the 200-mile EV. For example, my Nissan Leaf using its CHAdeMO quick charger port would charge up to 80% typically in a half hour. With the current CHAdeMO standard a 200 mile EV could take an hour and 20 minutes to get to 80%. Knowing this new reality GM has begun to push for the SAE to raise the amount of electricity that can flow through the SAE Combo plug. However, the SAE Combo standard was never designed for this kind of wattage and there is a chance that increasing the wattage of this standard may require a complete remaking of the onboard charger and the charging station’s power electronics. Faster charging is crucial for the new vehicles because the idea behind quick charging is that long distances can be traversed with short, half hour or so stops at quick chargers along the way. Thirty minute breaks on long trips are tolerable, however, a one hour and 20 minute stop for charging would be off-putting to many drivers.

Tesla is building out its own charging infrastructure to advance this concept. They focused their proprietary infrastructure on connecting cities and it makes its chargers available to most of it’s Model S and X owners for free. It is now possible to travel from coast to coast in the US via the network of Tesla Superchargers, as well as travel between many major cities; that is as long as you are driving a Tesla vehicle. If you are not driving a Tesla and trying to go long distances the quick charger infrastructure is virtually nonexistent.

I believe that the Tesla model for EV charging infrastructure is what the EV charging infrastructure, from now and on into the future, should be. I strongly believe that the focus of nearly all of the money available for developing charging infrastructure from governments, businesses and other sources should be used on developing a network of quick charging stations connecting cities across the nation. However, Tesla already has a network of charging stations nationwide, and this charging infrastructure extends to most of Europe, Japan and other countries where Tesla sells its vehicles. As Tesla sells cars to new markets it tends to build out the infrastructure there. To get the biggest bang for our buck we not only need to follow Tesla’s model and put charging sites to connect cities and the coasts, but we should adopt the Tesla Supercharger as THE ONE STANDARD.

Tesla’s Network of 611 Supercharger Sites as of March 2016

Remember from my last blog that a relatively few quick charging sites are needed to service the entire country. I calculated that the entire United States including Alaska and Hawaii would be fully serviced with somewhere around 2900 charging station sites. Tesla as of March 2016 had 611 Supercharger sites, with some 3600 individual plugs available for charging. If 80% of those sites were located in the right places, some 488 sites, then we would only need to fill in the remaining 2412 sites to make EVs as functional in long distance travel as petroleum fueled cars for most people.  

There are too many standards for quick charging to make a buildout of infrastructure cost effective. In order to meet the charging needs of long ranging 200-mile EVs with three quick charger standards we would need to build three times the number of chargers than we would if we only had one standard. We only need one standard for quick charging. With Tesla as the universal charging standard for the US we would already have about 1/6th of the infrastructure built. Making Tesla’s Supercharger the standard would allow people with new 200-mile EVs able to take advantage of the Tesla Supercharger network that is already in place to travel long distances and across the country. By using the Tesla system there wouldn’t be any need to modify existing CHAdeMO and CCS/SAE Combo standards to have much higher wattage outputs in the near future to accommodate the new 200-mile EV paradigm since the Tesla system was built for large capacity, 200-mile plus range EVs from its inception. Tesla’s standard can already use the existing SAE j1772 level 2 standard and adaptors can be purchased to use the existing CHAdeMO standard chargers. Tesla people have been working out how to adapt the CCS/SAE Combo to work with Tesla vehicles. With Tesla soon to be able to use the very small infrastructure that has been built using the SAE Combo standard and already being able to use CHAdeMO and the universal SAE j1772 level 2 standard these existing chargers will not go to waste.

You might be asking if it would be OK for other manufactures to use the Tesla standard given that it is a proprietary standard patented by Tesla Motors? Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has stated many times that he wants other automakers to use Tesla’s network of Superchargers. He, earlier this year while in Paris, said, “We want to do anything we can to help the advent of sustainable transport – so our network is open to any other manufacturer that want to use it.” You might ask, if Tesla wants other companies to use its system, why patent its innovations? Tesla has justified its applications for patents to protect the innovations from attempts to block the technology. The company has promised not to sue anyone using its patented electric vehicle technology as long as they are using it with sincere and honest intentions. Over a year and a half ago Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk let it be known that they were working with other automakers on sharing the Tesla network, however, he did not mention which particular ones they were working with.

You now understand that having one standard will be very beneficial to expanding the marketability and reach of the electric vehicle. You also understand that the Tesla Supercharger network is the best choice for that one standard now that 200-mile EVs will be the norm instead of the exception. You also know that the Tesla has already built out about 17% of the charging network needed to cover the entire United States, and that having one standard will be much more cost effective than trying to build out the infrastructure for three standards. Now I need you. I need you to talk this idea up. I also need you to tell the automakers that you want the Tesla Supercharger standard for your next EV. You will need to contact your political leaders in national positions and tell them that you want one Tesla based standard for the country. Politicians should think about making laws that make this happen. Automobile executives should make pledges to one standard and that standard should be the Tesla one.

These latest postings of mine have rekindled my passion to see electric vehicles become commonplace. I believe that this may have opened a door to establishing a national campaign to move Federal, state and local government money budgeted for electric vehicle infrastructure towards completing a network of charging sites that serves the entire country. I would like that network be one standard and that standard be Tesla. It just makes the most sense. However, even if the three standards remain, a network of quick charger sites 50 miles apart connecting all major cities would go a long way to making electric vehicles fully competitive with petroleum based cars.  

Tesla Model 3s

For those of you who haven’t been tuning into what has been going on in the automotive industry with respect to electric vehicles (EVs) lately, from 2008 when Tesla introduced the first viable electric vehicle to the market there have been more than 1.5 million electric vehicles sold world wide, and over 500 thousand EVs sold in the US alone. Most electric vehicles sold by the major automakers to this point have had the distances that they can travel on a single charge, also known as range, limited to between 65 to around 100 miles. Tesla Motors, on the other hand, has had its vehicle’s ranges typically set at 200 miles or above. They flirted with a 160 mile range vehicle for a while, but sold few and dropped the production of such vehicles as of March of 2013. Tesla’s vehicles so far have been marketed to upscale luxury/performance market, which inadvertently is like saying its vehicles were expensive. Tesla introduced itself to the automobile market with it’s Roadster, which sold for $109,000, and gave consumers a two seat sports car with 221 miles range. Tesla then introduced an electric full-sized luxury sports sedan called the Model S with a 265 mile range and a price tag of around $86,070. They then introduced an SUV into the market known as the Model X that started with a sale price of $80,000 and a range of around 250 miles per charge. Despite the higher price tag of Tesla vehicles Tesla has managed to sell a very large number of vehicles and its sales are increasing month over month allowing it to capture a lion’s share of the sports/luxury car market segment. When we look at the EV market from its current renaissance that began in 2008 to now we see Tesla with vehicles having ranges of 200 miles and above and the major automakers producing and selling quite a few electric vehicles with ranges of 100 miles range or less.
Now, I have owned experimental converted production electric vehicles, home built EVs, and production EVs, and I have found that they have been useful even with ranges as low as 50 miles. However, having more range does open up the possibilities of more opportunities to do more things with an EV than is possible with lower range vehicles. A greater range is a more desirable aspect when comparing EVs as well. I now live out in the country about 40 miles from the center of the nearest big city. Big cities have a natural draw with the possibilities of seeing cultural events, conventions, shows, etc. Even though I can easily find charging stations from where to charge, the range limitations of my current EV, a Nissan, Leaf (EPA 75 miles) does lead me to make decisions limiting my activity. I don’t plan long trips with my EV. If I travel someplace where driving around is part of the attraction I might limit my driving while there because of the need to conserve my range to get back home. I do have the option to use my hardly ever used gasoline vehicle, but I really don’t like using my gasoline vehicle. As soon as I get into the other vehicle, from the roar of starting it up, to trying to hear the radio over the engine noise, to the smell of gasoline and oil when filling it up, to the sluggish performance when I hit the accelerator pedal, the experience is unpleasant for me to say the least. I love driving my electric car, but on occasion I do wish it had greater range.

I wouldn’t need a lot of range. Just enough to drive to the city and drive around and still be able to get back home without needing to charge again. Just enough to drive around 3 hours, around 150 miles, before needing a quick charge. I don’t like driving more than three hours without a break anyway. Three hours is just about all my bladder can take. I figure if my EV had about 200 miles of range before needing a charge that would be really comfortable for me. Of course it would have to be affordable. From the latest news coming from the EV world it looks like I will be in luck.

In 2007 Tesla’s visionary CEO, Elon Musk put in its business plan that it would make an affordable electric vehicle. Typical for Tesla, this vehicle, which was later named the Model 3, would have a range of more than 200 miles. Two hundred miles! This summer Tesla began taking orders for this vehicle and took around 400,000 $1,000 deposits for it. As excited about this vehicle as I am, this isn’t the point of this article.

Chevy Bolt 200-mile range electric vehicle

The point of this article is that with Tesla’s announcement of a 200-mile range, affordable EV, the reality of the EV world has changed. In particular the 200-mile range EV has changed the infrastructure question for EVs. You see, ever since Elon Musk tweeted out to the world the idea of the Model 3 on July 16, 2014, major automakers have been making plans for their own versions of a 200-mile range electric vehicle. First to market will be GM with its Chevy Bolt EV (not to be confused with the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid). The Bolt will be available for purchase late in 2016 with a price tag of $37,495 and an EPA rated range of 238 miles. Tesla will be out with its Model 3, priced at $35,000 with a 215 mile range beginning in 2017. According to Kazuo Yajima, Nissan’s global director of EV and HEV engineering, Nissan plans a completely redesigned Leaf with at least 210 mile range for 2018. Hyundai has announced that it will be coming out with a 200-mile EV also coming in 2018. Ford first announced that it would not be following other automobile manufacturers into the 200-mile range EV market was quickly followed by Ford’s president and CEO Mark Fields announcing that the automaker wants to be the leader in affordable 200-mile EVs starting with an entry that he claims is well on its way to production to come out some time in 2019. As you can see, ever since the announcement of Elon Musk for Tesla to produce an affordable 200-mile range EV, several major automakers have solidified their commitments to producing 200-mile range EVs, but that isn’t the end of the story. Nearly all other major automobile manufacturers, VW, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and others have since then put forward that they too are going to be producing 200-mile range EVs, sounding a death knell of sorts for the low range EV. This future onslaught of 200-mile range EVs entering the market in the next few years dramatically changes downward the infrastructure needs for EVs.

Tesla level 2 charger at home and level 2 convenience ChargePoint charger on the street.

The problem is that the current model for EV charging infrastructure is based on low range vehicles of less than 100 miles range. The charging behavior of EV drivers under that model is based on long time periods of charging typically at home, work and other places. Both home and work charging allow for long stretches of charging, which allows for charging at 240 volts, also called level 2 charging. This level 2 charging or the SAE j1772 standard is a standard all electric vehicles being manufactured today are compatible with. Outside of home and work the charging model strategy is to develop convenience charging opportunities at places like businesses, shopping centers and public parking. Typically this type of charging uses level 2 charging, which depending on the amperage can take a vehicle like mine with 75 mile range between 4 to 8 hours to charge. In this model battery capacity is small and most charging is done at home where there is plenty of time to charge over night. If you work at a place that is over half of your total range this model would want you to add a charging station at your work place so that you can get home. If you are planning to go to an event that is over half of your available range you may want to find a place to charge near the event so you can charge while you are attending. Are you getting the picture? Low range EVs require a greater infrastructure to deal with their low ranges. It also increases the hassle of owning an EV since you have to look for charging stations to help you complete trips and hope that they are close to where ever you are going and not occupied by other vehicles charging when you get there. Sometimes when you do find an acceptable charging space the charging spot is occupied by an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. This is called among EV owners being ICEd.

There is a way out of this hassle. Most EVs are equipped with quick charger options. For the mainstream automakers these are also known as level 3 charging. Level 3 charging is done at 480 volts and can charge a vehicle like my Nissan, Leaf up to 80% typically in a half hour. Unfortunately there are three standards for quick charging. The Nissan championed Japanese model is called CHAdeMO. There is the challenger to CHAdeMO called the SAE Combo developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) championed by GM and is considered the US and European standard. The third option is the Tesla Supercharger. Tesla, since it’s vehicles have much larger battery capacity, need a system that is much more powerful then the standard ones being championed by the major automakers to achieve that half an hour charge time. The idea behind quick charging is that long distances can be traversed with shorter, half hour or so stops, or trips to areas without chargers could be still accessed as long as a quick charger is available near by or along the way.

Tesla SuperCharger location

Tesla’s long range vehicles simply don’t need an extensive infrastructure of convenience chargers since even at 200-mile range Teslas have plenty of range to do commutes, event trips or shopping and return home. Where charging was needed for Tesla’s long ranging EVs was on long trips between cities. The concept is to travel a few hours stop at a Tesla Supercharger area, plug-in, go to the nearby place to get food, use the restrooms or just relax for about a half hour and then unplug and drive for a few hours again before repeating the process. Tesla built out its own charging infrastructure to advance this concept. They focused their proprietary infrastructure on connecting cities. Tesla continues to add to its charging infrastructure and makes it available to most of it’s Model S and X owners for free. It is now possible to travel from coast to coast in the US via the network of Tesla Superchargers, as well as travel between most major cities.

The quick charger long distance model for the major automakers doesn’t really exist. Nissan has moved to mimic Tesla’s model by insisted that its Nissan dealers install CHAdeMO level 3 chargers and make them available to Leaf owners for free. However, Nissan dealers are a hit and miss proposition for travelers, typically located only in or near cities. They also are known to close their charging stations down when the dealership is closed, or require subscription to the chargers charging plan or other confusing hassles. Also, not all of the Nissan dealers have installed CHAdeMO quick chargers despite the urging from Nissan corporate. The other quick chargers that have become available have been installed by personal, institutional or business investment and not by coordinated planning. Where I live some churches have installed CHAdeMO quick charging stations, while, some retailers have installed some SAE chargers. A grocery store here, a local government office there, a business here and there, all installed willy nilly, and willy nilly is not a plan designed to make the quick charging infrastructure useful. From my perspective there needs to be a change in how charging infrastructure is being done. Especially since the EV world will change due to the coming 200-mile range paradigm.

This new move to 200-mile range EVs gives us an opportunity to rethink what we are doing. First, it means that all the money being used to develop level 2 convenience charging infrastructure will be, in the very near future, unnecessary. With 200-mile range EVs, slow level 2 charging simply doesn’t do enough to help at shopping centers, restaurants and convenience stores to be useful. They will still be useful at hotels since plenty of time can be devoted to charging overnight, given that the wattage of the charger is brought up to the maximum of the SAE j1772 standard (19.2 kW) and the vehicles are redesigned to accept this much higher wattage through their j1772 standard charge port. However, level 2 charging at work would only be useful if the employee has a longer than 2 hour or 100 mile commute each way, which would be highly unusual. I believe that the Tesla model for EV charging infrastructure is a glimpse at what the EV charging infrastructure from now on should be. Let the infrastructure for level 2 charging build out organically, based on requests and particular need. However, the focus of nearly all of the money available for developing charging infrastructure from governments, businesses and other sources should be used on developing a network of quick charging stations connecting cities and at strategic locations in city centers.

You would be surprised how relatively few quick charging station locations are needed to service the entire country. I calculated out that around 60 quick charging locations would meet just about all of the charging needs for my home state of Wisconsin, and that is with charging stations spaced only 50 miles apart. The entire United States would be fully serviced with somewhere around 2900 charging station areas. For example the state of Hawaii would only need around 12 level 3 type quick charger stations to meet all its needs on all its islands. Surprising isn’t it? Especially when you think there are 168,000 retail gasoline stations nationwide in comparison. Why? How? You say.

The reason why EVs need much less infrastructure then internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles do is that the infrastructure that powers electric vehicles is already at our homes, and electric vehicles get their fuel to move mainly at home. Let me give you an image that might help you understand how EVs are different. Just imagine that you had a gasoline pump at home where the gasoline was piped to it directly from the refinery. Also, imagine that you got in the habit of filling up your car before going to bed every day. You would have a full tank of gas every time you left your home in the morning. The only time that you would need a gasoline station would be on long trips that were beyond the range of the gasoline in your tank. Now imagine everyone having the same pump as you do. The need for gasoline stations would drop dramatically. Well, with electric vehicles that pump at your home exists with the electricity that comes to your house anyway to power your lights and appliances.

Mid 1990s professional conversion Destiny2000

You might ask how does charging at home work? With this I can give you the benefit of my experience owning and driving experimental electric vehicles. When I drove around in my Destiny2000, which was a Fiero converted to run on electricity that had a custom front hood and back deck with solar panels on them. The Destiny 2000 was an attempt to make a mass market EV by a group of engineers way back in the mid 1990s. The powertrain system was simple, just 18, 6 volt deep cycle lead acid golf cart batteries, an off the shelf motor controller and a large and rugged DC electric motor. Where the engineers really advanced things was in the onboard charge controller that could use from a regular household 110 volt outlet electricity to the electricity from a 240 volt appliance outlet. What this meant was that where ever there was access to electricity I could charge the vehicle. I even carried with me a standard lightbulb socket adaptor that I could use to charge up from. My Destiny2000 gave me 50 miles range consistently and even though the battery pack was 26 kWh big; bigger than my Nissan, Leaf’s 24 kWh battery is now, it would charge fully overnight on a regular 110v outlet.

How is this possible? Batteries are funny creatures. When they are empty they charge fast until they pass 80% then they develop resistance and slow down. At around 90% they charge much, much slower. So even though you can get to 80% of charge in a relatively short period of time it will take much longer to get from 80% to 90% and from 90% to 100% it would take a great majority of the time charging. I lived in a close in suburb of a major city. My fully charged Desitny2000’s 50 mile range could get me from where I lived on one side of the city to the suburbs on the opposite side of the city and back on one charge. Most of the time I would only drive to work, take my kid to soccer practice, or do some grocery shopping and still only use around half my charge. Since I didn’t typically drive all the way to empty on my Destiny2000, the charge time needed, even at 110 volts, was shortened dramatically. It allowed for the majority of the time charging to be spent on that part of the charge cycle where the battery’s resistance didn’t allow for lots of electricity. The extra electricity would only be turned into heat that might damage the batteries or it would electrolyze the water in my lead acid batteries into hydrogen and oxygen. My charge controller was sophisticated enough to determine how many amps it could push through the batteries safely. All this stuff came together to make using a regular 110v outlet just fine for charging overnight. Even though I had a 240 volt outlet available to me to charge the Destiny2000 faster, I never used it, being perfectly content with a regular outlet that charged my battery to near 100% by morning. AAA in a resent survey found that all drivers on average drive about 32 miles a day. If you were to double that amount to 64 miles encompassing nearly all drivers you could easily recharge those miles overnight with a level 2 type charger. Which is to say that for the most part you will be able to leave your home every morning with the full complement of the 200-mile range of the battery pack.

You may have noticed that the battery on my converted Pontiac Fiero/Destiny2000 was 27 kWh and that it was bigger than my Nissan, Leaf’s battery of 24 kWh, yet my Destiny2000 could only go 50 miles on a charge while the Nissan, Leaf, a bigger vehicle, could go 75 miles on a charge with a smaller battery. This is because lead acid batteries are extremely heavy, 1080 pounds heavy for my Destiny2000. A large amount of the stored energy in the batteries is used to just push these very heavy EV batteries around. The Nissan, Leaf uses a lithium ion manganese oxide battery that weighs 660 pounds, much less than the battery in the Destiny2000. That weight difference and better control over power electronics in the Leaf make all the difference. As EVs advance greater ranges will be possible with smaller lighter batteries. Hopefully, big jumps in technology will make even longer ranges possible. Just as an example of how advances in technology can affect existing EVs, Tesla has offered owners of the original Tesla Roadsters a battery upgrade that transforms the Roadster’s original range of 221 miles to a 330 mile range in the same battery space.

Tesla’s SuperCharger network as of October 2016

The paradigm shift to 200-mile range electric vehicles is upon us with production by nearly all the major automakers set to begin now. This new paradigm has changed our charging infrastructure needs going forward. Gone is the need to have a bunch of level 2 charging stations all over the place, 200-mile range EVs don’t really need them. Also, having quick chargers placed willy nilly about based on random funding and support should give way to having level 3 quick charging stations positioned mainly on the highways spaced at 50 mile intervals connecting major cities and much fewer but more strategically placed quick chargers located inside cities. Government, businesses and other organizations investing in building out the EV charging infrastructure should concentrate their efforts on the 2,900 or so quick charging locations needed across the country to make EVs fully competitive with liquid fueled vehicles. The pieces for creating a world of truly cleaner and quieter transportation is nearly in place thanks in large part to the vision of Elon Musk and the willingness of the rest of the industry to follow suit. All we need now is for us to take the desperate pieces that make up that future and put them together in a cohesive plan of action we can all participate in.

Remember when real estate was the only sure bet investment? It had real… estate value. You could pass it down to your children. You could live on it, or in it. It had physical size and was tangible. However, its value went up and up and up, far beyond its real affordability. Why? How? Because the banking game had changed and people who were not bankers were throwing money at unsophisticated ordinary citizens and telling them they could afford these homes and the extra demand pushed the price of houses up. When the houses became more expensive they just increased the amount of money they could loan people of a certain income. Prices went even higher and these non-traditional bankers started making loans to people without checking their credit worthiness or doing a check on anything. Volume was the watchword for these brokers. With every loan they made they collected a fee, and they experienced none of the consequences if the loan went bad after. Then they turned around and sold these mortgages in pieces of paper, telling the purchasers that the value of their paper was guaranteed because, even though these were risky investments, they were backed by something of real value, actual houses, which at the time was an unmistakably safe investment. Real estate had only gone down in value twice in the United State’s history and that was during the Great Depression and again during the Reagan years associated with the savings and loan crisis. Even though the new bank/brokerage houses were doing the very same things that lead to the Great Depression, in their eyes, the United States was an endless ocean of prosperity, it was like the atmosphere or the seemingly limitless number of fish in the sea, their illegal activity couldn’t possibly pollute it or diminish it, at least not to the extent that it would create any real damage to our economy. For them there wasn’t any danger of the United States going into anything that remotely looked like a Great Depression; to the new bank/brokerage houses that was like talking about ancient history. Things were different now. We have smart phones and super fast computers; we drive sophisticated cars that run on gasoline. Besides, real estate is real estate and will not go down in value. Unfortunately, we know now that that type of thinking is ludicrous. So use that critical thinking to think about what people are telling you about our money and gold?

The true value of gold is what others are willing to give up or do to get it from you. Gold, just like real estate, only has value when conditions are right to support that value. The value of gold is relative to the value of its importance to what you buy given a particular set of circumstances. Let me give you an example. If I am starving and I will die soon if I don’t get food and I have gold in my pocket, I will want to exchange that gold for food real fast. Gold has no value for me in comparison to food. However, if the food supply is limited and the person who has food also needs it to survive, my gold is worthless. It is worthless to both or us because you can’t eat it and survive. The decision of whether you will get food at all for your gold depends on either the goodness of the food holder’s charity or the timing when the food holder thinks there will be more food. Chances are the food holder will only give you at most a portion of his food for gold, and more likely then not, he or she will want all your gold for an amount of food that will most likely not sustain you. You can substitute anything that has a myth of value for the word gold here, such as jewels, platinum, stocks, bonds, money and even mansions. Let me explain. During the Bataan Death March wealthy people signed over mansions for food only to die anyway. Suddenly faced with dying their mansions weren’t that valuable anymore. Back to my point, things only have value relative to their worth during a given circumstance. It is an illusion to thing otherwise. So I am going to ask you, why do you think gold is any different than paper money? When you ask your self this question I want you to remember how real estate was discussed at the beginning of this post?

Paper money is the truest form of exchange under trading goods themselves for goods, or at least it should be. It truly has no value on its own. The value of paper money is in the exchange of goods. For example, socks are worth a buck a pair, let’s say, and shoes are worth 10 bucks. You can also say shoes are worth 10 pairs of socks. Money is just a medium of exchange. If you put gold into the equation things get more complicated. Let’s say that you purchase wool and knitting needles with 2 bit of gold and you make ten socks. You go to buy shoes but the person isn’t willing to sell you his shoes for your 10 socks. He wants gold. He says you have to have ten bits of gold first. So you have to go to someone who has gold to buy gold but the only gold in this economy is the gold you first used to purchase your wool and needles that you used to make socks. You go to him and he wants three pairs of socks for the one bit of gold, because he wants to rent shoes from the guy with the shoes when he goes outside and renting shoes only costs one bit of gold and he plans to go out twice. Now, think of this simple example on a Macro level.

Why is gold valuable? One reason is that it is not a common metal found in abundant quantity. It is scarce compared to the demand for it. Just imagine how valuable gold would be if it was the medium of exchange for the world’s economy. Very few people would be capable of possessing it. All the gold in the world would not equal all of the active money being handed over for goods in a single day in the current size of our world’s economy. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that gold simply doesn’t work in a modern economy as it didn’t work in my example about the socks.

There is another factor, perhaps an even more important one about how money works in our economy that makes using gold not beneficial to the ordinary citizen. The factor is how ordinary people and businesses create added value goods. Money is created in an economy by adding value. For example, clay has little value alone. You or I, if we know where to look for it, can probably get clay for free. However, you take that clay, shape it, glaze it and fire it and it becomes a useable bowl. This is something that has value to a lot of people. Let’s say that those people specialize in making spoons, or soup or something else. Let’s say you have made more bowls than you need and you want to explore the idea of not using your hands to eat soup out of your bowls. You are willing to exchange a bowl that you made to a person who has made spoons in excess of what they need. You come to an agreement that the bowl is worth four spoons. The value of the clay, plus your know-how and labor now has a measurable value in spoons. Spoons, in this example, become the de facto currency since compared to other goods spoons have a traded value when it comes to bowls. Bowls have an exchange value measured in spoons, thereby creating the “spoon” standard much like the so called “gold” standard. Substitute currency for spoons and now the bowl has an added value over clay of some figure of money. You, the lowly bowl maker has just created money in an economy over the value of nearly valueless clay. This happens almost every time goods or services are exchanged in our economy.

I know it is hard to believe, but you can replace the word “profit” quite comfortably with the words “value added” without messing up the meaning too badly. You purchase bowls in bulk that are priced at a value added over clay, and you sell the bowls in smaller quantities in a nice display at your retail establishment at an added value over bowls purchased in bulk. Every step of the way creates money. In order to deal with the ever-expanding value of raw materials being turned into value added goods you need something that will grow with it, and gold can’t do that. In order for gold to keep up with this enormous engine of economies creating money, mining of gold would have to be on a level comparable to how we mine for coal or drill for oil. Gold, like oil and coal is a finite commodity. We probably in a year or two after switching to a gold standard would begin talking about peak gold.

Currency, however, doesn’t have these problems. It is just a medium of exchange. The value of goods and services should not be based on the currency, but the value of your goods or services against all goods and services. What makes the value of money go up or down isn’t a factor of the money itself, but its supply in the economy. In order for money to not go up or down in value is how close the government agency hits the mark of how much money was created during a particular period. In the United States the agency in charge with matching the production of money so as not to create inflation or deflation is the Federal Reserve.

Our reserve bank tries to keep the amount of money in our economy at the level of the economies creation of money. This is a bit of guesswork and is not an exact science. If they project too low then the value of currency will increase and you have deflation, if they put too much money into the economy the value of currency will decrease and you have inflation. The Federal Reserve adds or detracts money from the economy by printing money and lending it to the banks that circulate it into our economy in the form of loans. If interest rates are high, fewer people get loans and the money supply in the economy drops, if interest rates are low, loans are more affordable and many more people barrow money and increase the money supply.

The Federal Reserve is not a private institution; it is, however, an independent institution wholly owned by the Federal Government and the therefore owned by the citizens of this country. It is independent to free it from politics so that it may concentrate on its mandates. It has two mandates, the first is to keep inflation under control and the second is to keep unemployment low. It makes a profit over its expenses and hands its profits to the US Treasury. This is apposed to the Federal Reserve banks that distribute the money from the Federal Reserve. They own unsalable “shares” in the Federal Reserve, which entitles them to 6% of the Fed’s earnings. The Fed and the Federal Reserve Banks make up the entirety of the Federal Reserve system. The Federal Reserve system is necessary because we industrious Americans keep taking things that are worth nothing or of little value and making them more valuable, (i.e. making clay into bowls). We create money in our economy and so the money supply has to increase with that. The Federal Reserve controls interest rates at the bank level by the interest rates it is willing to lend to banks. (Oh, so that is why they report the Federal Reserves interest rates so much on the news.) The interest rates asked for by the Fed are directly linked to two things, the cost of borrowing and the rate of inflation; however, inflation has other factors affecting it as well. Remember that when interest rates are high people and businesses tend to barrow less. This dampens economic growth, but maybe necessary to slow down inflation. If it makes interest rates low then businesses and people tend to barrow more and grow their businesses and employ more people. However, more money flowing to people and businesses tends to increase demand and that causes inflation. Remember the example of the cost of real estate? Banks made credit to people wanting to buy houses really easy and it inflated the prices of homes? Low interest mortgage loans that were too easy to get by nearly everyone, caused housing prices to go up and up, in other words, caused there to be inflation in the housing market. This can happen with an entire economy such as one the size of the United States as well.

Gold doesn’t have the capacity to do anything that the Federal Reserve Bank can do to regulate inflation or deflation. Gold doesn’t allow money supply to keep up with money creation, which is what happens in a sound economy. Gold is a limited supply commodity that is finite. All the mined gold in the world today would fill up a little over two Olympic sized swimming pools. It won’t reach to cover the entirety of the United State’s economy and there ain’t a prayer that it will cover the worlds economy.

Moving to the gold standard would probably cause a supreme amount of deflation.

Deflation has economic problems that can be just as bad as inflation. If we tried to use gold as our currency, we would have massive deflation. Massive deflation leads to money hording rather than investing and banks can’t lend because the value of things are going down. Deflation is mostly associated with depressions.

Just like what happened in the housing market and the supposed incorruptibility of the value of real estate, we have been manipulated in believing the value of certain things such as gold don’t go down only to have them change in value dramatically. If you can’t remember back 14 or 15 years ago to the end of the 1990s let me remind you, gold had gone down in value to a 22 year low. That means that those who had purchased gold close to their retirement as a sure bet in the late 1970s, for the intervening 22 years of their life, they would have seen their savings drop by 69%. If someone had saved 100 thousand dollars and purchased gold with it in the late 1970s, at the end of the 22 years, provided that they hadn’t touched it for living expenses, they would have had only gold worth $31,000 by the end of the 1990s. If they would have kept their money as cash in a bank, they would have been far ahead even while earning relatively low interest on their deposit. I am sure with every drop in the price of gold during those 22 years; investors were told that gold had enduring value, that you can’t beat gold as an investment, etc. etc. But the reality was that gold went from a high of over $800 per ounce around 1980 to a low of somewhere around $250 in 1998 and stayed there until 2001. That drop in value would have given us an inflation rate of over 14% a year for 22 years on average. The truth of the matter is that most of that 69% drop occurred in the first 5 years. Most average citizens would have experienced an inflation rate of 50% or more per year. 50% inflation for half a decade would have been devastating to our economy. Given this historical reality anyone can understand why gold doesn’t work as a currency anymore.

If we truly are thinking of social and economic justice then think of this. One percent of the wealth of the United States is controlled by 1% of the population. Murphy’s golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules.

During deep recessions there isn’t a lot of economic activity so interest rates come down to encourage companies to barrow and pump that money into the economy. That part of our economy is not working the way it should work. Businesses are holding huge amounts of cash on the sidelines. They don’t even need to barrow to do what they may want to do. Growth has stopped and many businesses have gone out of business. Ordinary citizens have gone bankrupt or had their homes foreclosed on or are upside down on their mortgages. The housing market, which would normally be the leader out of a recession, is still in very bad shape with trillions of loaned dollars still at very high risk.

How did we get in this mess? We repealed a very important law called Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall prohibited investment houses from entering into the mainline banking business of lending to homeowners and small businesses traditional loans. Allowing investment houses, now often referred to as investment banks, into traditional banking is what created the mortgage crisis and destroyed our economy. It is Wall Street for the last decade and the Republican controlled congress of the Clinton era and not the Federal Reserve that screwed things up.

In conclusion gold simply isn’t a good investment right now since it is at economic bubble values, gold won’t hold its value over time because investors will abandon it so that they can use the cash from its sale to invest in something else that will be growing in value or is proclaimed to have the ability to retain its value over currency, also, gold won’t be a good substitute for US currency because there just isn’t enough of it around to make it a practical currency. In order for our economy to work we need a money supply that can grow with the creation of money that happens naturally in a healthy economy. Currency that has no real commodity value such as paper and coin money is an ideal medium of exchange as long as the supply is controlled in the economy the way the Federal Reserve controls the entrance of money into our economy. We as a nation could reduce the swings of inflation and deflation of our currency by instead of only backing the US currency with the full faith and credit of the US government, we instead index the value of the US dollar to the cost of goods commonly traded between countries. This would enhance the dollar as “the” exchange currency by having the US government promise to exchange the US currency with supplies of goods on the index. This would make the Federal Reserve’s job a lot easier since heavy swings of inflation and deflation would largely be non-existent. The Federal Reserve would only have to get close to what the money supply should be for that time period, but the index value would be the ultimate arbiter of the value of the currency. In other words sell your gold and invest in yourself and in things with which you have experience.

It seems that the high price of crude oil internationally has caused the production of a great amount of crude oil here in the United States. The production increases has put so much crude oil on the market that it has lowered imports of oil coming from outside North America. In comes the Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada. You would think that tar sands crude would finish the job on imports and the United States would be independent from sources of oil outside the North America continent. By a strange twist the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline crude isn’t bound for us. The entire thrust of the pipeline through the heart of the United States is because the company wanting to build the pipeline, TransCanada, wants to reach international markets in Latin America, Europe, Africa and other places around the Atlantic. TransCanada plans to take its product to the Pacific Rim nations from ports in Seattle and elsewhere on the Canadian west coast.

TransCanada wants to ship its tar crude to the rest of the world by going through the United States to Gulf coast terminals and perhaps sell some to the refineries there. The oil companies and refineries at the same time got an idea as well. The crude coming through the pipelines would not be theirs; however, a new market had been growing around the world for finished refined goods that come from crude like gasoline. They had all the crude oil they needed to produce gasoline for the United States from non-tar sand sources. They didn’t want to produce too much gasoline for the domestic market and thereby reduce the price of gasoline. However, if they spent the money for the extra refining needed to process the tar sands crude they could sell products like gasoline and diesel to the world at a margin well worth the investment. So the entire plan for the Keystone XL pipeline has been hatched and it doesn’t include lowering the price of gasoline in the United States. The number of jobs that will be produced that will be permanent jobs will be minimal. A few more refining jobs, some pipeline maintenance workers and maybe a job or two at the terminal connecting to the tanker ships where all this oil and oil products will be eventually loaded up and shipped elsewhere.

The increases in production will have virtually no effect on US prices for gasoline since they are being used to feed the increasing demand for oil coming from emerging economies around the world. As more and more economies emerge from third world status into the global economy their increased demand for oil will drive prices ever higher. That is unless our United States elected officials work to prevent our excess production and the Canadian tar sand oil traversing our country, from being shipped overseas. To create the excess supply that will bring down prices we need for that stuff to stay here. (Not that I want it to stay here, I am an environmentalist. What I am doing is poking holes in the argument that we need the Keystone XL pipeline because it will reduce the cost of gasoline for American consumers.)

We can only effectively solve the affects of high priced gasoline in the United States in three ways, either a tremendous increase in domestic output of oil that creates a surplus of oil and requiring that oil to stay here, or reducing our consumption significantly thereby creating an oversupply here in the United States and requiring that oversupply to stay here, or that the we look at possible substitutes or alternatives to oil to moderate demand on oil by providing consumers choices. The first approach, increasing our domestic supply has happened, however, with exports our price dropping excess oil can be shipped overseas where the emerging economies will grow to soak up all of that extra production. The push to reduce demand is also happening. The government’s dramatic increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards has pushed new car fuel efficiency dramatically upward thereby reducing the growth of the demand for oil. The recession and the high price of gasoline has also dampened demand significantly and moved consumers to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles and less gasoline. Yet, these two major factors have not had a significant effect on the price of gasoline as of late, which is an example that oil doesn’t follow normal economic assumptions. There is greater than good chance that oil prices are dictated and manipulated quite effectively by individuals and groups who control its supply. In this case the third option, which is to find other ways to power our vehicles, may be the only true way to control oil prices. Unlike finding more oil, substitutes have a strong moderating effect on future oil prices because consumers can switch to a substitute if oil prices get too high. Alternatives or substitutes for oil provide for a more effective competition in fuels. International prices can’t go up but so high since the height of their price depends on the height of the price of its competing alternatives. Remember if oil becomes more expensive than an alternative then everyone who can will switch to an alternative to save money.

The three oil substitutes that need the fewest infrastructure changes for distribution are ethanol, natural gas and electricity. Unfortunately ethanol prices have risen dramatically in recent weeks because of the droughts in western and mid-western states. Making ethanol a real alternative would also added demand to a commodity that is not used to the demand levels of crude oil. Shifting America’s motive power to ethanol will probably push prices up much higher and production would be limited by land availability. There are also ethical problems using a food crop to power our vehicles. However, making ethanol from non-food feed stock would be a highly effective alternative to gasoline. Natural gas, on the other hand, has a very strong distribution network already in existence; it is in abundant supply and is far less expensive than gasoline. If vehicles were made to be multi-fuel vehicles, taking both natural gas and any combination of ethanol and gasoline we could be heading down the path of providing the vehicle owner with what the motive fuel arena really needs, which is a lot more choices in fuels. Electricity has the added advantage of being produced from a variety of fuel sources such as natural gas, coal, nuclear, as well as renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric power. This variety keeps prices for fuels under control by distributing demand among a wider variety of fuel suppliers.

The ultimate solution to the oil price problem would be a vehicle that can take advantage of all three fuels. This vehicle would be a multi-fuel vehicle capable of taking advantage of gasoline or natural gas, or even liquid petroleum gases such as propane or butane. It would also be a flexible fuel vehicle able to use 100% gasoline all the way to 100% ethanol and any mixture in between. Ideally this vehicles combustion engine should be reserved to play a backup role as a range extended generator for an electric vehicle similar to the Chevy Volt and the Fisker Karma set up. In this way the owner could easily choose between fuels to the one that allows him or her to keep more of their hard earned income to use for other purposes. It is the other purposes that will spur the economy onward and upward.

All three fuels, ethanol, natural gas and electricity, when combined would provide choices to consumers and provide a moderating force on run-away oil prices. They would do that by competing with each other to provide the lowest price so that each can hold onto a share of the fuel market. There are other reasons for using alternatives to oil such as the lower impact on the environment and lowering our dependence on foreign sources of energy. Still, for strictly economic reasons, alternatives are now a necessary strategic response to preventing future economic hardships caused by oil price increases and volatility.

Energy is found in many, many forms, many of which we name and think of as substances. We often call things like oil, coal and natural gas energy. We call the companies that extract these substances energy companies, but these substances are not energy and the companies that extract these substances are not energy companies. Have you seen a shake-it-up flashlight? Ever walk barefoot on sand that was so hot it burned your feet? Ever watch a sail boat move across a bay? Energy is equal to the movement of your hand, it is equal to sun shine beating on the sand, it is a breeze flowing though the air. Energy is energy and it cannot be created nor can it be destroyed, it is merely converted from one form to another. We don’t loose energy as we use energy; energy becomes dispersed. It goes from being directed and useful to being spread out and less useful that is only if it is not contained or recaptured. This energy stuff is hard to understand because we have wrapped language around it that is more metaphor than a correct understanding of energy.

Movement is energy that can be converted into other forms of energy such as the movement of water through a water mill wheel moves the grinding stone to make flour. In a hydroelectric dam that energy is used not to turn a grinding stone but a turbine, which spins a generator to produce electric energy. In much the same way the movement of your hand in a shake-up flashlight accumulates electrons either in a battery or in a capacitor and then the electrons/electricity move through the light circuit and are converted into light. Movement = energy, energy = electricity.

In the hydro-energy cycle the sun heats up water that converts to vapor, vapor becomes less heavy then air and travels up in the atmosphere where its heat energy is dissipated. It eventually condenses back into water and ice around small particles of dust, once heavy enough it returns to earth in the form of rain and snow it collects in the streams and flows down hill by the force of gravity. We capture gravitational energy and covert it to mechanical energy as in the form of a flour-mill or in the turbines that produce electricity.

Let me break for a quick aside. Huge dams don’t have to be built to capture this cycle. It is money interests, politics and poor engineering that have given us the gigantic hydroelectric dam. We can do much the same energy capture by making small structures over various places along a river that allow the river to flow freely and yet capture its movement so we can harness the power of the hydro-cycle with minimal impact to the environment and without endangering wildlife and vistas. It is only poor engineering and shortsightedness by those involved that has given rise to the giant hydroelectric dam.

Have any of you gone on to your roof on a sunny day?  Were the roof shingles hot? Where did that heat come from? You are right. It came from the sun. We build roofs to protect us from the sun and rain. When the sun hits our roofs it turns sunlight energy into heat energy. That heat energy radiates through the rafters into our attics and ends up heating our houses. We spend energy mostly from burning substances to remove that heat energy from our houses through the use of air conditioners. Instead of fighting energy with more energy and pollution, why not use the roof’s surface to make electricity and hot water? Solar panels are one of the more benign ways to capture energy. They capture energy from sunlight and turn it directly into electricity. If not photovoltaic solar panels, we should at least be looking at using the sun’s rays to produce hot water. We use hot water everyday. Making hot water would also allow us to heat our homes through radiant floor heating. The sunlight energy is hitting our roofs anyway.

Ever go out in a storm and see the trees whipping around? That movement is a sign that there is energy out there applying force to the branches to move them around. What is making the branches move? Oh, wind, of course. Wind power makes sense since the wind blows trees, leaves and dust around. Why not put it to use generating electricity? Wind has been used for thousands of years as a source of energy. In farms across America windmills on top of towers were how farmers pumped water out of the ground for their livestock. In Ocean City, Maryland the trees are all bent over in one direction because most of the year the wind blows constantly in one direction. Going to the beach in the winter is amazing. All the flags are tattered because of that constant, heavy wind. I looked at the power lines stretched along the highways of the ribbon like islands along the coast coming from some far away power plant where literally tons of coal are burned every day to produce electricity for these sea shore towns, all the while there is wind traveling through and over and around the buildings. Thousands of watts of wind power only being used to provide the flapping motion in flags.

There are other sources of energy that have minimal environmental impact and have gone largely unused such as geothermal, wave action conversion systems, tide conversion systems, systems to take advantage of the steady ocean currents, harnessing the power of the jet stream and ambient temperature conversion systems. WE LITERALLY ARE BATHED IN ENERGY. As Obi-Wan Kenobi said of the force the same can be said of energy, “It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” We don’t have to burn a single thing to get useful energy from our surroundings, and converting or capturing all that energy and turning it into electricity, the cleanest and most universally useful form of energy, is a no-brainer. We can convert various naturally accessible energies to electricity and we can use electricity to produce heat, light, radio waves, microwaves, electron beams, motion and on and on.

The solar powered vehicles of the World Solar Challenge run for more than 30 hours during that race at average speeds greater than 60 miles an hour, powered only by sunlight hitting the surface of the vehicles. Thirty hours is only the length of time of the race however, these cars can travel continuously on the power of the sun. (Google: Xof1) What this proves is that we can make vehicles that can get their energy to move from their surroundings alone. This is quite a radical departure from our standard idea for transportation; however, it is one that can help us think of energy in a different way. It used to be that we couldn’t think of a vehicle that used anything other than gasoline or diesel. Then came ethanol first as a blend and then with the advent of flexible fuel engines vehicles that can take up to 100% alcohol. We have come to learn that there are vehicles that can be powered by natural gas and liquid petroleum gases like propane.  Now we have electric vehicles in the mix. All these things have merged to allow us to think of automobiles as possibly being fueled differently. Electric energy generation can be though of in this way as well, and there is where the connection to electric vehicles changes the entire paradigm. If electricity can come from renewable energy sources and electric cars use that electricity, electric cars are renewable energy vehicles. Yes you can power a car with a wind turbine.

Energy is found in many forms and much of it is convertible into electricity. In our human history we have used biomass (wood in a fire) to keep us warm when it was cold and to cook our food. Then we learned to tame animals and hitched rides on their backs. The grazing that the animals did provided the energy we needed for transportation. We discovered how to use the wind to travel over water with sails and later we harnessed the movement of water and wind for mills to grind grain. There we stood for hundreds of years until we discovered that coal burned especially hot and water expanded tremendously as steam when boiled. With that knowledge we powered the first industrial revolution, then came oil and we got another shot in the arm for industry. Then our tinkering with electricity led us on a different path. Innovations turned away from energy and transformed our world through the advent of the computer and access to information. The usefulness of electricity has proven to be far more world changing than any other form of energy however, we were still generating it just one step up from the caveman burning wood. Our thinking surrounding energy had not changed significantly for over 100 years. However, electric vehicles allow us to think of energy differently. For example, our breaking systems in cars had not evolved that much from pressing a piece of wood against a wheel to get it to stop and we referred to the heat energy given off by friction brakes as waste heat.

Regenerative braking is part of that out of the box thinking that is opened up when we think of powering our vehicles with electricity rather than through internal combustion. Before stopping a car meant converting momentum energy into heat energy and transferring it to the air, now it means taking momentum energy and converting it into electric energy to slow down and storing that electricity in batteries and then using that energy captured through regenerative braking now in the batteries to over come inertia, which then deposits the energy in momentum energy again. When I look at the Metro rail trains around Washington, DC the most evident feature of their undercarriage is their huge disk brakes. When the all-electric trains slow down to stop at a station, part of the sound that you hear is the braking noise from those monstrous disk brakes. I look at those disks and think what an absolute waste. The Metro trains using regenerative brakes could help power the trains going up hill with the trains trying to maintain a controlled speed while going down hill. The engineers who designed those trains just don’t get it.

To get it you need to think of energy in a different way. For example, the idea of one central location providing the energy needs for a wide area, especially by using fossil fuels, when we think about it, should seem ludicrous. Nikola Tesla made the big electric power plant possible with AC power originally to move the energy harnessed from Niagara Falls to Albany, New York, but energy is abundant and all around us. We don’t need to do it that way anymore. The water movement in your pipes when you are taking a shower has energy in its motion sufficient if captured to power a clock. We see the heat of the day move Mercury up the thermometer, ambient heat turned into the motion energy of an expanding metal fluid. That expanding metal could push a piston that would turn a crank that would turn a gear that would spin a turbine that could produce electricity. When you start thinking out of the box like this, you discover that the number of ways to produce electricity from the energy around us are innumerable.

To solve the power plant problem we need to arrive at a more distributed or self generated form of energy generation. This new way of thinking of and capturing energy can be for all of us. It is only a matter of investment, smart design and strong political action.

Even if we don’t fully move to renewable and distributed energy production, when it comes to our personal vehicles, we can make a difference. Trying to wring out greater efficiencies, and lower and lower pollution standards out of millions of internal combustion engine cars on the road is ridiculous. As internal combustion engine cars get older they become less efficient and pollute more and more. It is infinitely easier to regulate and convert a single power plant then millions of power plants on our roads and highways. Electric cars, even when being powered by coal in a power plant are far more efficient then gasoline powered cars.

The renewable electricity that I purchase for my home also powers my Volt. The energy I put into my car when going up hill comes back to me when I am going down hill. The energy I put into getting up to speed comes back to me when I am braking with regenerative brakes. Energy is momentum. An object in motion remains in motion. Energy is potential as a rock high on a mountain about to be cut loose and travel down the mountain with great force and speed. Energy is the movement of wind. Energy is heat on a hot day, the movement of waves, the tide coming up and going down, the warmth that you feel when you hug your loved ones. Energy is sunlight knocking electrons around on a solar cell and those electrons traveling down the attached wire into a car battery where it can be used later to move the car through an electric motor. If we concentrate on what energy really is we can find energy enough for all we wish to do with it without ever having to burn, pollute, fight wars for, or pay extortionist prices to get at it. All we need to do is think of energy in a different way.

National Plug In Day will be held on Sunday, September 23, 2012, and is an unprecedented nationwide observance drawing global attention to the environmental, economic and other benefits of plug-in electric vehicles through simultaneous events staged in cities nationwide.

Plug In America, the Sierra Club, and the Electric Auto Association are teaming up to plan for this effort, which will sound the bell through plug-in parades, tailpipe-free tailgate parties, test-drives and other grassroots activities.

The goal of National Plug In Day is to get owners of plug-in cars together with the general public. The general public can then talk to the owners of these vehicles and hear what the cars are like to live with in the real world. We are hoping that this will motivate more members of the public to consider a plug in vehicle for themselves the next time they are thinking of purchasing a new vehicle.

It is my hope that this year’s event move from being solely United States observance to being an event that includes many more cities in the U.S. and many international one as well. To make this happen we need organizers everywhere. The Sierra Club is offering assistance to what they call “City Captains.” City captains will be the point of contact for organizing the National Plug In Day event in a particular city.

Below the fold is an Email with contact information to get started.

Dear Electric Vehicle supporter,

Will you serve as a “city captain” (local event organizer) for this year’s National Plug In Day? Several of last year’s city captains have signed up, but we are looking for additional talented volunteers.

Sunday, September 23 will be the 2012 National Plug In Day. Sierra Club, Plug In America, and the Electric Auto Association are pleased to team up again this year to work with local partners to organize this second annual effort, which will call attention to the fact that a switch to EVs is one important way to reduce emissions and dependence on oil.

Like last year, city captains will represent a community group promoting EVs (could be a local Sierra Club, Electric Auto Assoc group or a different organization) or an individual EV advocate who has strong community connections. As we’d like this to be a grassroots effort, corporations may participate in National Plug In Day, but may not take the lead in organizing a local event.

Last year’s effort was terrific -with events in 29 cities with thousands of people and hundreds of plug-in vehicles in attendance as well as significant media attention. Whether it was an EV parade or an electric tailgate party in a parking lot or a vehicle and charging station show-and-tell, the events offered a great way to educate the public, the media, and policymakers about the many benefits of electric vehicles. We want this year’s Plug In Day to be even bigger and better.

Opportunities and Guidelines for 2012 Plug In Day City Captains:

• Will receive the following resources from the national core organizing team: an organizing toolkit; template news release/news advisory; local media contacts; and national publicity including a central web site for posting local information.
• Will take the lead in overseeing all aspects of the local event.
• By mid June, will have identified a planning group, a planned (even if not yet confirmed) location for the event, and a general idea for the event.
• Will participate in periodic city captain calls to receive information from core national organizing team and to share ideas with other city captains.
• Will generate a list of community contacts and will develop a publicity/media outreach plan.
• Will agree to overall national initiative guidelines (like on corporate sponsorship issues).

If you have questions or would like to sign up to be a city captain, please email Troy Burbank (troy.burbank[at]sierraclub.org) -ideally by the end of this week- with your name, city, phone number, email address, mailing address, and confirmation that you agree to the city captain guidelines described above.

Thank you and all the best,

All the best,
Gina

—

Gina Coplon-Newfield
Senior Campaign Representative for Electric Vehicles
Sierra Club
www.sierraclub.org/ev

Is the Tea Party Real? The reason that I ask this question is because I was doing research on the Web to get a better understanding of who and what the Tea Party was and what it stands for and found things that seemed inconsistent. For one, according to a Gallup poll conducted on April 5, 2010, the “Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics.” This seemed odd to me because the rhetoric that I heard coming from those said by the media to be most associated with the Tea Party, namely Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul and Dick Armey, many times expressed that particular segments of the US population were the sources of our ills.
I couldn’t imagine Hispanics, for example, being part of the Tea Party in a big way since many of the Tea Party spokes people have worked xenophobic ideas about Hispanics into their utterances. Without Hispanics, the United State’s largest single minority, demographic figures could not be mainstream. Also, given Ron Paul’s denial of the importance of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, his refusal to vote to grant Rosa Parks a congressional coin for her part in the Civil Rights Movement and his view that shop owners have the right to deny service to any patron they wish even if the denial is because of their sex, race, religion or sexual orientation, why any of the members of these groups would support the “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party” (The Atlantic) or the Tea Party itself. My feeling is that those that claim to be the leadership of the Tea Party movement actually have little to do with the actual people who answered the poll identifying themselves as of the Tea Party movement. I also think that outside of claiming that they have views that are inline with the Tea Party movement, Tea Partiers don’t actually think in the terms that are used by those who have put themselves out in front of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party’s beginning dates back to February 19, 2009, when Rick Santelli ranted on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a CNBC on floor editor. In the rant Santelli responded against the idea of helping ordinary American citizens to stay in their homes. Mr. Santelli in his rant doesn’t call them ordinary American citizens, however, he refers to them as “losers.” Having watched family members go through the pain of foreclosure, I could never lower myself to call anyone dealing with foreclosure a “loser.” Most of the people I know that have been caught up with the foreclosure process have done so because of circumstances beyond their control. Santelli’s rant showed his upset with the idea of using taxpayer money to help just such people about to be foreclosed on to refinance their loans at lower interest rates. Supposedly this rant went viral. There is some speculation as to the validity of the true viral nature of the rant, because in extremely short order, I am talking within a few hours, there were Websites featuring the rant and calls for the establishment or claiming the existence of a “Tea Party,” something alluded to in Santelli’s rant and, much of the early activity on the Internet about the rant was conducted by well-established conservative Internet sites.

What doesn’t ring true to me is that this request to solve the financial crisis through the refinancing of mortgages compared to what had already been earmarked for stimulus to banks, state and local governments and large corporations was a relatively small amount of money, only a few hundred million dollars as opposed to billions and trillions used so far by the Federal Government. It also doesn’t ring true since this part of the stimulus was nearly the only part aimed at helping ordinary citizens, and despite what the media tells you ordinary citizens typically act in their own self-interest. Rick Santelli’s rant dealing with refinancing goes against people acting in their own self-interest. By having the Federal Government deal with the deflation that had occurred in houses everyone benefits. For example, if you are a home owner who has borrowed responsibly but there are dozens of homes about to be foreclosed on in your neighborhood, what better way for the value of your home to be protected than having someone, anyone, offer those people a chance to refinance their homes so that the monthly payments are manageable. No one company, no not-for-profit group, no bank has stepped up to offer what the President has proposed. For those struggling to meet their mortgages this would have been a real good thing since it would have most definitely stopped the downward slide of home prices, stopped mortgage-backed securities from becoming completely worthless, something that would have prevented Europe from having as many problems as it is having at the present, and put a large group of Americans back on a solid financial footing. Americans back on a solid financial footing would in turn have spent into the economy quickening the economic recovery. Refinancing is not like granting money, the Federal Government will eventually get it back with interest. Going down the path recommended by Santelli and then forced upon us by the newly elected “Tea Party” candidates actually has helped prolong the problems that we have experienced with the economy. So, with some calm and some understanding of the bigger picture you can see how the Rick Santelli’s rant was counter intuitive, counter effective and doesn’t make sense as something that people would really want for themselves. This leads me to believe that most people wouldn’t go for Santelli’s solution and that there was something else at play.

What I believe was at play here was that a relatively small group of people, upset by the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States, in particular those who supported Sarah Palin, decided to glom onto this as their rallying cry. They would have glommed onto anything that had a faux patriotic twang to it and was anti-Obama. At its core this was an anti-Democratic and anti-President New Administration as Santelli puts it, thing to latch onto. The right-wing of the Republican Party was ready to pounce on just such a thing through their “Astroturf” program. Astroturf being the Republican program to create fake grassroots movements opposed to anything the Democrats suggest. The difference this time being that the Republicans are unfortunately using the Internet. That the spark for this faux movement came from a crazy business ranter is no surprise to me since many Wall Street commentators have been chaffing at the fact that the financial world has changed and what is worse is that things could never go back to the roaring days of excess. We know we can never go back because 99% of us have figured out that excess only leads to fiscal and financial ruin. So what remains for the financial pundits? To rant how Obama has spoiled the party for them, while in the real world President Obama probably saved their butts. These three things, the upset Wall Street pundit types, the at-the-ready Republican “Astroturf” building machine and those still upset by Barack Obama’s win, ultimately led to the first forming of the Tea Party. However, I don’t believe that it was that great of a movement until the mass media focused on to it. The mainstream media made this out to be a much larger viral thing than it probably really was and the mainstream media probably led by the conservative media also helped pick the Tea Party’s leaders that aren’t.

One of the first things I discovered about the Tea Party as a whole is that they support government action and do not hold to a strict “Libertarian” view. I found polls showing that nearly all Tea Partiers weren’t Libertarian in their thinking. However, Ron Paul, a true Libertarian, was christened the “intellectual godfather” of the Tea Party very early on by The Atlantic. Mainstream media plastered this all over the place by re-reporting The Atlantic’s opinion as if it were news. This led J. Ann Selzer, a Bloomberg News pollster to state, “You would think any idea that involves government action would be anathema, and that is just not the case.” The polls also discovered that Tea Partiers believe that they are being taxed fairly, which is another aspect of their beliefs that is inconsistent with the anti-tax agenda that is promoted by its so-called “leadership,” namely Dick Armey. We can see clearly that the views of the anointed leadership by the mainstream or right-wing media, doesn’t mesh with the views of the actual Tea Partiers. In fact the number one leader that the Tea Party people favor is “no one,” 34% of Tea Partiers stated that there is no one that represents the group; that followed by Sarah Palin at 14%, Glenn Beck at 7%, Jim DeMint and Ron Paul at 6% and Michele Bachman at 4%. That means that 94% of the Tea Party does not view Ron Paul as representing their views while the media pronounced him the Tea Party’s “intellectual godfather.” Which begs the question, is the Tea Party, as portrayed by the media, actually a construct of the media, or could it be a construct of people and organization that have substantial influence on the media, or a construct of the Republican Party?

Unfortunately, the Tea Party made up of people who identify themselves strongly as the Tea Party, is real. Fortunately, they don’t hold most of the views that their media anointed leaders hold. Unfortunately, they are far more extreme about the few beliefs they hold in common. Their common areas of support, according to a poll done by the University of Washington, are; 73% disapprove President Obama’s policy of engaging with Muslim countries, 88% support the Arizona immigration law, 82% are against gay and lesbian marriage. There you have it. Those who identify strongly that they are Tea Party members in essence are an anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic and anti-gay group. There are finer ways to put this than my putting it so bluntly, but I am talking about the essence of the Tea Party movement. The polls won’t say this outright, but in essence the polls say the same thing. People are aware of political correctness and they know how to answer questions to remain “PC” or at least keep themselves from being exposed as extremist. Which is to say that if you asked Tea Partiers straight out in a poll if they hate Muslims, Hispanics and gays they would know to answer “no.” But, if you catch up to them at a party, especially after they have had a few drinks in them and you make sure that they feel safe for expressing their true views among what they believe are like-minded people, you will get the answer you won’t get in a poll. The University of Washington’s poll was extensive and didn’t ask right out questions of bigotry, but clearly, the three questions that rose to the surface among all the strong Tea Partiers polled ended up with a particular bent. That bent in essence is what I stated that the core of the Tea Partiers are anti Muslim, Hispanic and gay.

Given the realities of who and what the Tea Party really is, it is amazing that right-wing Evangelicals have moved in to co-opt the Tea Party after the Libertarian Paulbots and the anti-tax Armey Republicans have moved in. They jumped in to force Christianity on the entirety of the American population through government programs, to stop abortions and contraception, and to censor anything that they might think would offend the all mighty God. Evangelicals are not a perfect fit with the Tea Party but maybe better than Libertarians and tax cutters. This has created a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of the Tea Party that has to fit in the Republican construct and the mainstream medias creation, which is a Christian, gun-toting, anti-tax, libertarian, fiscal conservative group within the Republican Party. And as it is defined this way in the media, so it has attracted elements of these groups.

Given the partly manufactured and partly grassroots nature of the Tea Party, the Republicans have been having a hard time steering this monster of their own making. The Tea Party politicians that have been put forward in the last election have to have emerged from that soup that the Republicans and the media are now calling the Tea Party, but they also know that they have to feign allegiance to the real Tea Party of Muslim, Hispanic and gay haters. The politicians produced by this supposed construct must be new to avoid a connection with the Republican Party that tanked the economy. What were produced were mainstream Republican politicians that are not so versed in mainstream Republican political gamesmanship. And these new Republican’s job is much harder because they have to vote in lock step with the GOP leadership while remaining a “Tea Party” kind of guy. It is a bad mix.

As long as the Republican Party couches what they want in terms that the Tea Party Frankenstein understands it works. But if the Republicans say something like “reduce government spending” the Tea Party Frankenstein drinks the Cool-aid too deeply, and we get, things like the debt ceiling fight, which hurt everyone, Republicans, the Tea Party, American citizens and our nation’s credit rating, everyone but the Democrats. Use your best Frankenstein imitation when saying the following. “Master say reduce spending, must not allow debt ceiling to go up, must to stop Obama.” You can do a bunch of these using the Frankenstein voice like one for stopping appointments, another for taxing the rich, one for killing Social Security, another for ending food stamps, etc. The Tea Party politicians have turned out to be a blunt instrument at best for the Republican Party, a club when a scalpel will do. But as bad as these Tea Party politicians have been at doing government, they never the less don’t represent the actual Tea Party. What you are seeing is rookie mistakes by a new crop of Republican ideologues that lack the experience of good politicking. This is not, however, pure Tea Party ideology at work.

The Republicans can’t embrace the real Tea Party because that Tea Party is made up of extremists, who hold extremist views. Views, that once the population as a whole gets to look at rejects, as witnessed when watching how Arizona politicians were thrown from office, the very same politicians who crafted the controversial immigration laws for the state that the Tea Party likes so much. The Republicans in the current election cycle have shown what they really are, and that is puppets for the power grabbing, influence purchasing, media manipulating worst part of the 1%. Scott Walker may have ridden the wave of Tea Party populism into office, but he is most likely going to be recalled for his union destroying, pension killing, slash and burn cost cutting all while handing his masters massive contracts and tax breaks. Walker, is not a Tea Partier, he is a true Republican created by his billionaire overlords. Once the Muslim, Hispanic and gay hating Tea Partiers realized this they jumped on the bandwagon for kicking him out, which, brings me full circle.

Outside of their misguided and extremist ways, the Tea Party is also made up of people who have been swept up in the financial crisis of our time. Tea Partiers are people, who have had homes foreclosed on them, have lost jobs, have been unemployed and underemployed for years. Despite what they have been told what to think, by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the like, the bill collector at your door, the phone or electricity being cut off, the not being able to go to the hospital without going bankrupt are all realities tugging at all of our elbows and Tea Partiers as well. Eventually, the bigoted hatred for having a black President gives way to dealing with the reality in which we all live. Eventually Muslims, Mexicans crossing the border and the private lives of men and woman don’t seem as important as keeping the wolves at bay. And though they may resist with their thinking at first, for having been so deeply brain washed by the conservative media, they wake up to the fact that we have been robbed, and it wasn’t the gays, it wasn’t the Muslims, it wasn’t the Hispanics that did it, but white men in suits, in offices in New York. Men who have never known what it is like to work long hours for minimum wage and barely making ends meet and then having that meager lifeline cut by some suit, just so his account at Tiffany’s can be higher, or so he can trade in his yacht for a bigger one.

The Tea Party is largely an unorganized group of people who have been influenced by hate speech. Hate speech that blames their current ills on others. Outside of that there is nothing uniform about those who call themselves the Tea Party. They mainly live in the rising anti-Obama and anti-Democrat rhetoric of the Republican “Astroturf” making machine. They are in a word, “against.” What they are against is mainly whatever the individuals feeding them what to think tell them to be against. Who makes the message for this multi-headed, multi-issue grassroots movement is the Republican Party. Separately, the politicians that claim Tea Party affiliation are really just inexperienced right-wing Republicans working for their corporate overlords who also are the main contributors to their campaigns. Never has this been more evident than viewing the choices that the Republicans have put forth for Presidential candidates this election year. All of the Republican candidates are running to be puppet and chief for the Koch brothers or the like, one of them, Herman Cain, actually saying so in a speech, another a venture capitalist.

So, is the Tea Party real? It is, but not in the way that other parties and movements are real. The Tea Party exists mainly as the spirit of discontent among people who don’t know how to make things better. Because they are discontent and are searching for answers, they are easily manipulated. They have been told that the words “Democrat” and “Liberal” mean accepting things that they don’t want to accept, such as Muslims, Hispanics and gays. So they seek answers in “Conservative” forms of mass communication. When the Republican Party failed them by bringing on two wars and a great recession, they went seeking new answers. Since they couldn’t seek the answers to what they wanted with the Democrat liberals, the Republican “Astroturf” team was ready to provide them with an alternative, the Tea Party. It was the very same tactic that the Republicans used to get Sarah Palin into the Governor’s mansion in Alaska. The former Republican Governor was ousted for corruption. A Democrat should have been a shoe in to the office; however, Sarah Palin came in vowing to clean house, and ran as the anti-corruption candidate for the Republican Party and she won! It was like watching a crime family member named Vinny Gepetto getting caught for steeling money from a church’s poor box, so he is fired. When it comes time to hire someone else to watch over the poor box the people of Alaska chose his brother Joey Gepetto over one of the church’s trusted altar boys because Joey has assured Alaska that he is going to clean house at the Gepetto family and that his family’s stealing days are over. What did George Bush say? Fool me once…

The Tea Party as a political movement as we know it in the end is largely a construct by those who control the Republican Party and the right-wing media, similarly in the way that Sarah Palin is a construct of those who control the Republican Party and put her forward as a capable politician that could have been the President of the United States and withstand the rigors of national and international politics. After having put forth a person who couldn’t remember her puppet master’s talking points well enough so as to need to write them down on her palm and have her win the Governor’s office for Alaska in the midst of a Republican corruption scandal, and again putting her forward as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the nation with all her shortcomings, and having her accepted by some as viable, the puppet masters of the Republican Party realized they could manipulate a good portion of the electorate. When disgusted over the financial crisis and scandal threw the Republicans out of office in 2008, the forces behind the Republican Party knew they had to do something. If the prolonged financial crisis were to remain identified with the Republican Party, then the electorate would most likely continue to punish them for the problems they created. To change their situation the Republicans went to the Sarah Palin playbook and decided to create the Tea Party as an alternative. The Tea Party, carrying their Sarah Palin shovels, were going to clean house while never having to leave the Republican fold. The Republicans imbued the Tea Party with the attributes of the disenfranchised Libertarians, Evangelical and xenophobic groups often independent of the Republican Party and worked them into a frenzy against the Liberal Democrats in 2010, and it worked!

In conclusion, the Tea Party as a true grassroots movement is not real. The Tea Party as a group of politicians representing a large group of a dissatisfied electorate also isn’t real. The Tea Party as a mishmash of Libertarians, Evangelicals and xenophobic as created by the Republican Party does exist, but the only thing that holds them together is their xenophobia, something that is not ascribed to by a great majority of American citizens.

A PS of sorts to Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC, his tea party reference in his rant was a description of what he thought should be done to “derivatives” saying in essence that there should be a “tea party” to gather up derivatives and dump them into the Chicago River. Santelli’s reference to a “tea party” was at its core a protest against Wall Street. Something that is disconnected from Tea Party rhetoric now.

Originally published on the Daily Kos

Camille Etchison on Occupy Wall St.’s facebook page found this survey on foxnews.com that asks:

Do ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters represent your views about the nation’s economic problems?
     Maybe. I am not even sure what they want.
     No. They have no idea how jobs are created or how a free-enterprise system works.
     Yes. These folks are right about corporate greed and what’s happening to the little guy.
     Other (post a comment).

Camille Etchison asks us to

“FLOOD IT!!! SPREAD IT EVERYWHERE; YOU CAN RE-VOTE.”

I agree. I think this site needs a good old fashioned Blitz. Click on the logo below and it will take you to the survey.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/10/07/do-occupy-wall-street-protests-represent-your-views-econom
y/#ixzz1gZMsH1R8