It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  At least, more and more business sectors are sending their wish lists to Treasury Secretary Paulsen to get their piece of the bailout package. 

Hmmm….  Are homeowners getting any help here?  Or are we just going to bail out every for-profit company in the country?  

Vt Fuel Dealers Association is making their case when they get their day with Paulsen.  Check out their press release below the fold.

From Vermont Business Magazine:   

November 10, 2008

(Submitted by the VFDA) The Vermont Fuel Dealers Association and eight other trade associations have asked US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen for a meeting to discuss the financial issues faced by heating fuel retailers. Late Friday, we received word that a meeting is in the works. We all took this extraordinary step to ensure that the voice of small businesses, not just Wall Street and multinational corporations, gets heard.

This is what we intend to tell Secretary Paulsen.

The Economic Emergency Stabilization Act isn't supposed to pay for bonuses to executives. The $700 billion appropriated by Congress is supposed to free up lending to small businesses and consumers in order to jumpstart the economy. That isn't happening. Just be patient, some argue, the impact will take time to trickle down. But time is a luxury the heating fuel industry does not have. It is getting colder and peak winter demand is approaching.

Wall Street speculators drove energy prices through the roof this spring and early summer. Consumers came to us in great numbers and demanded protection in the form of fixed price contracts. Our companies had to lock in very expensive wholesale supply contracts in order to meet that consumer demand.

A critic from a Texas based energy consulting firm read our letter to Secretary Paulsen and wrote to VFDA:

“Your customers made an unwise choice. That's not the oil dealer's fault. It was just a dumb decision by the customer. Are you suggesting your dealers give their customers $3 heating oil with no consequences to the customer for being stupid and buying at a higher fixed-price?”

The comment demonstrates the arrogance of speculators who made billions at our expense. Vermonters are decent, hard working and thoughtful people who were simply trying to protect themselves and their families while Wall Street was cheering a bull market in crude oil. This summer heating oil customers were told by everyone, from environmentalists to T. Boone Pickens, that the end of oil was coming. Crude oil had increased by $50 in a matter of months– rising to $147 a barrel in July. During this run-up they were told by Goldman Sachs that $200 a barrel was next. Facing $4.50 a gallon retail heating oil in July, they were told by the best and the brightest on Wall Street and CNBC to expect to pay $7 a gallon by the time the snow flies.

There was a panic. Many consumers locked in a fixed price. And, as required by Vermont law, so did the dealers.

We are the face of Main Street, local business men and women who live in the communities where we work. We are not asking for a bail out or a hand out. We want to borrow money and pay it back. We simply want the system to work as Congress intended, to free up commercial and consumer lending. This is the point of EESA, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. We want the Treasury Secretary to know that for all of the attention to Wall Street, small businesses employee 95% of the nation's workforce. We are the engine that drives the national economy. It is time to put the EESA to work for all Americans.

As a cultural force, inertia is often underestimated. When we think of the social analog to Newton’s Law of Motion, we might be tempted to think of inactivity or inaction. The effect of slack. But as in nature, inertia in culture has its own special strengths, and there are implications to that. The particulars of tradition, for example, are often kept in place by that inertia. Taking off one’s hat when inside, for example, would be a bizarre habit to initiate out of the blue, but since its a tradition, inertia keeps it alive. Eradicating it would take an effort, so why bother? Alternately, the tradition itself has little real world impact precisely because it simply putt-putts along under the power of inertia only.

Other traditions are more complicated. Take the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. The Pledge was originally written by a Christian Socialist Baptist Minister (yes, you read that right – creeping socialism!) in 1892, was quickly introduced to public schools, and was desecularized with the “under God” line officially thrown in by President Eisenhower in the early 50s.

Ever since its imposition on children, the Pledge has stirred controversy. The latest is a few miles to the north of me in Woodbury, where a group of parents suddenly – and angrily – woke up to the fact that kids in the school had not been required to recite the Pledge for years. This group has been agitating and making life difficult for school officials for a while now, and show no signs of letting up until they get exactly what they want – nothing less than a return to the daily, coerced oath of loyalty under god by all the school’s students. From the Times Argus:

School officials have repeatedly sought, without success, to satisfy parents and others who want the pledge to be part of the daily routine.

Although the school board’s latest attempt to address the issue enables students to recite the pledge daily, children are only allowed to do so as part of a voluntary group in the school’s gymnasium.

Ted Tedesco, the parent responsible for forcing the issue in September, said the solution unanimously approved by the board wasn’t what the 300-plus taxpayers who signed his petition had in mind.

I grew up with the Pledge, and when I got older it started to bug me. I was one of those kids who would lean on “loopholes” – mouth the words, tell myself that if there wasn’t actually “liberty and justice for all” in the country, the Pledge was invalidated, etc. It was just the principle of the thing. Being forced to swear my loyalty in a nation that prizes personal freedom.

It’s something I want my own children to understand that they have the freedom not to do to the extent that it comes up in their school (which it does). I would like to see it dropped entirely out of the general principle that we shouldn’t force kids to stand up and pledge themselves in such a way, regardless of what the pledge is or isn’t. Still, you don’t see me leading protests on it. That’s inertia for you.

But in Woodbury, and other schools, the tradition of reciting the pledge has fallen off. That means inertia is now on the side of not reciting the pledge. That also means that its proponents can no longer be considered to be reflexively reflecting cultural inertia and a kneejerk resistance to any change. No, what these parents want to do is step in and make a mandatory change in all childrens’ and teachers’ behavior. They are no longer trying to preserve something that they see as important, but are rather attempting to take new ground in the conservative culture war on the rest of us. If successful, the words of that Pledge will have new meaning, and a precedent will be established granting conservative parents the authority to impose their beliefs directly onto everyone’s children and parents.

It also creates a stark contrast to those selfsame conservatives’ frequent claims about public schools in general. Teaching about other religions, biology (whether it be sex ed or evolution) or controversial literature is not imposing beliefs, it is simply imparting knowledge about the world. Students can do with that knowledge what they want, but it is a school’s responsibility to educate students about the world they live in.

Forcing students to stand up and pledge fealty before a sectarian deity is, obviously, a world different.

The head of the school board in Woodbury is no liberal. She is a solidly conservative parent who is a homeschooling activist (what she is doing as head of the school board if she so rejects the local school system is another question), and her conservatism is clearly of a more libertarian variety, as she says:

According to (Woodbury School Board Chair Retta) Dunlap, a sixth-grader has been assigned to round up willing students each day and escort them to the third-floor gymnasium where, under the supervision of a staff member, they can recite the pledge before returning to their respective classrooms. The board allocated five minutes of “free time” – starting at 7:55 a.m. – to accommodate the daily exercise.

“This leaves it up to the parents, or the children whether they do it (recite the pledge) or not,” she said. “It’s been really difficult to get it to this place.”

Good for her. I hope the district holds firm, and this should serve as an example to us on the left that in the face of the collapse of the Reagan conservative coalition into its constituent parts, there may be more such opportunities for coalition building on specific issues across what we are used to thinking of as ideological chasms.

Following last week’s triumph, there are already rumblings on the left about some of Obama’s initial decisions, such as Rahm Emmanuel to be Chief of Staff.  Certainly, on GMD we have seen some consternation about the possibility of Larry Summers for SecTreas.

I think it is important for all of us to keep some perspective.  If we remember back to the long-gone primary days, Obama was most certainly not the darling of the left.  He, along with HRC, represented the center-left in the primaries with Edwards picking up the left’s support.  Therefore, it is useful to remember that Obama is likely to govern from the center-left and that the left will never be fully satisfied with his decisions.  

That said, it is also useful to remember that we are getting some pretty substantial change right off the bat.  The papers today are full of articles about a series executive orders that the transition team is preparing.  They will among other things:

1) Repeal the global gag order on reproductive health.  Right now, any NGO that even mentions abortion is ineligible for federal funding (even if that funding doesn’t cover that mention).  This repeal will save millions of lives and empower many local NGOs in Africa and Asia to receive USAID and PEPFAR funding.

2) Repeal the ban on stem cell research.

3) Allow CA to classify CO2 as a pollutant. This will allow CA (and by extension the other CA-compliant states) to regulate CO2 emissions from cars.  

These are all things we can be very happy about and the list will grow in the weeks ahead.  It can all be done be executive order.   Not a bad start.

BTW: just for the record: Emmanuel’s selection means that Obama is simply being smart about keeping the House in line with his agenda.  Deft move, IMHO.  On Summers: not thrilled, but kinda wonder if this may be a bone to HRC for her support…  Anyway, the whole Harvard bruh-hah-hah misses the point that Summers did more for girls’ education than anyone in modern times by tying it to economic growth at the WB.  Transformed how most Ministries of Finance look at the issue.  Summers ain’t my first choice, but he ain’t all bad either.  

I expect in the coming year or so, we are going to see a lot of hand-wringing on the left about a lot of Obama decisions.  That said, I hope we will all keep some perspective…