The two issues are intimately related in complex ways, as posters here understand.

Obama is the best thing they have going, whose election will permit some way overdue repair and maintence work on the model, before the whole thing blows up.

McCain is not taken seriously by the serious people precisely because he would be unable to provide the necessary populist cover for what will be a long period on the blocks, while everything is tinkered with and tightened up.

BO can do that-si, se puede!-and so the think tanks of economic and political liberalism, both foreign hawks/domestic liberals and all the other permutations of the acceptable US centre, will assist in any way they can, to ensure he wins. The value of their assistance should not be underestimated.

I am very confident he will win and have been so ever since he announced he was running. I have serious money on it, and I am not in the habit of pissing my hard earned up against the wall.

The real question for what is left of the organised US working class, is what they are going to make of the best opportunity they have had since the collapse of their movement in the 60′s, to make up for forty years of moribund and utterly hopeless approaches to even the most minimalist version of their proper task. The US leadership of the organised working class has failed to maintain and improve the living standards of the working class (waged and salaried layers) and to preserve let alone extend, democratic rights generally, which is as essential as the wage contract for any working class movement if it is to survive. I do not think there has ever been a more utterly compromised and useless bunch of ‘trade union bosses’, anywhere in the part of the world loosley (and incorrectly) described as ‘liberal capitalist democracies’.

I mean no insult to the many frineds I have in the US trade union movement, but seriously, if they can’t make something of this window of opportunity and do some serious repair work of their own, then they will have handed the serious Right (as opposed to the whinging class) a victory not seen since the collapse of the Second International. That is how serious the stakes are in my view.

It’s just that, like I said, until the US gets its energy from sources that are not globally traded, it will have to pay the global price for it.

Well anyway it seems like an awfully defensive move in my eyes – a young female, blatently trying to steal the disenfranchised Hillary vote, but will it work after the convention? I thought that the Clintons did a good job rallying behind Obama and I would imagine that most of their supporters will follow them.

If American motorists don’t need to buy any oil, they’re a lot less dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf. From 1977 – 85 US oil use fell 17%, oil imports fell 50% and oil imports from the Persian gulf fell 87% (and their economy grew 27%). A big investment in getting off oil will actually work and it will pay for itself in savings fast. Obama’s ‘ten years’ is bit of speechy rhetoric, but a 10 year plan could get them on a path to halve oil use in 20 years.

d

Which, from what I have heard, was Obama’s speech reinforced that great line.

Started off with ” I can’t hear myself”

A growing fraction of the world’s production is going to come out of the Middle East (as people like carbonsink have argued at length).

Three points to consider:
1. Non-OPEC production has peaked, or is likely to peak very soon, well before OPEC.
2. U.S. oil production peaked in 1971 and has declined for almost 40 years despite huge advances in oil exploration and recovery technologies.
3. U.S oil consumption has grown year-on-year for a century, apart from a brief dip in early the 1970s, again in the late 1970s, and this year. In the 1970s oil consumption surged every time the oil price fell. There’s no reason to believe it will be any different this time.

Just these facts alone make it unlikely the U.S. will be any less dependent on Middle East oil a decade from now, probably more so.

Having said that, all power to Obama for setting the goal. We desperately need some leadership on this issue, and whether the motivation is oil independence or climate change, frankly, I don’t care, as long as pursue the right solutions.

Lets hope that Obama’s goal of oil independence is to his Presidency, what the Moon landings were to Kennedy’s. Just to hear him say the words makes me depressed at the pathetic lack of leadership we have in this country, where all we get is an ETS that excludes petrol, FuelWatch, and Marn talking up coal-to-liquids.