Boztopia.com

I wrote the original draft of this essay in a podunk motel in Nowheresville, Oklahoma—literally, I had no idea where it was, apart from it being two hours outside Oklahoma City. There were none of the amenities that we take for granted—no Wi-Fi, intermittent power, no working phone, no cell service, and a heater that’s spitting cold air in the middle of a below-freezing ice storm. I didn’t even have toilet paper.

I stopped there on the way from Washington, DC to my new home in Los Angeles because the roads were getting progressively worse as I drove through the states. Arkansas and Oklahoma’s sections of Interstate 40 are in terrible shape—full of potholes, cracks, and the like—and that’s before the freezing rain, sleet, and mush turned the trip into a potential deathtrap. Still, it could have been worse—I had plenty of food and supplies, and a place to rest my head. Many Arkansans, Oklahomans, and more are without power, and they may not get it back for weeks because the grid is collapsing under the strain of the bad weather.

Amazingly, I had working cable TV, and I had C-SPAN in the background, listening to the House debate the stimulus bill that will supposedly jumpstart our economy. And if anything could keep me warm, it was the boiling of the blood from listening to Republicans attempt to barter down an already-weakened package to buy themselves more tax cuts for businesses that have already larded up on billions of our dollars.

I don’t know what’s more galling. It may be the idea that the supposedly richest, most powerful nation in the world can ignore the fact that we’re literally falling apart from the inside out. Or it may be that the party that brought you a global recession, the loss of billions of invested wealth, and two ongoing wars that cost us billions of dollars a month (Why doesn’t anyone bring up ending the Iraq war as a way to bring in more revenue?), has the gall to say that the only way to get us out of the hole they dug is to give them more money.

Not to mention that the corporatized media is bound and determined to ensure that any message they distribute to the public plays their tune and no one else’s. I was listening to the editor of  The Hill ramble on the radio as I was driving about the need for “bipartisanship” and for Obama to reach out to  Republicans, as if nothing is more important to the destiny of the country than to make sure the party that got its ass thoroughly kicked in the last election at least has a cookie and milk as consolation.

But this is a deeper problem than the political Kabuki Theater you see in Washington, where everything is done for the benefit of those who maintain power. Even those who are out of power nominally still hold the reins when it matters, and the dance is all done to a calculus of ensuring the power stays with them. Outside D.C., however, the fundamental issues we face are larger than any single election or politician.

The stimulus is already stingy in almost every respect. It won’t bring us nationwide broadband investment. It won’t give us enough for smart power grids. It won’t cover enough for mass transit development. It doesn’t fund enough investment in alternative energy sources. It will help a lot, make no mistake—anything is better than nothing. But ultimately, all it does is paper over the cracks in the foundation—the proverbial Band-Aid on cancer.

I heard a Nevada Congresswoman talking about how Vegas was a boom economy, with record levels of home ownership and jobs, but with the failures of its two primary industries—construction and tourism—the city and state have fallen on seriously hard times. But as David Sirota wrote not long ago, Vegas is a symbol of the unsustainable cycle of development we’ve been pushing for decades now. You can’t build a thriving city based on industries that can go belly-up so easily. You need investment in new technology, new ideas, and new determination to see them through.

Let’s go back to my situation in Oklahoma. A modernized power grid that conserves electricity and provides more power with less waste could help families across the states hit by the ice storm and keep them from freezing or using portable heaters. Rural broadband investment could create statewide Wi-Fi networks that could keep people in instantaneous contact and give them all the information they need to figure out how best to deal with the storm, instead of trying to parse out information from the useless weather television channels or the equally clueless local news. (Imagine if the digital television transition had taken place during this storm, and all the people who would be completely in the dark, literally and figuratively, as a result.) And better roads with more people working on keeping them clean and sanded would not only keep people like me on the move, but it would provide more jobs and more economic boosts for states that desperately need them.

19 people would still be alive and thousands of people would still have power just from improving the services and systems we have. More money for states means more jobs, which means more services, which means both more tax revenue and more consumption of goods. I’m not an economist, but this isn’t freaking neuroscience.

Instead of the vision we need for true economic stimulation, we’re getting endless speeches from smirking Republicans unironically quoting Margaret Thatcher as an invocation of our slide into socialism—while many of these same people cast votes for TARP (both times) and every military action that’s drained our Treasury, wrecked other countries, and cost thousands of lives.

And the people who should be providing the vision as the majority are willing to provide business tax cuts that don’t work at the cost of more money given to programs that do work. Instead of throwing everything we have at full-scale national broadband investment (which alone could provide aid to everything from health care to green tech), infrastructure spending, and renewable energy development, we’re going halfsies.

And half-assing it won’t cut it for a genuine solution to our fundamental problem—that our way of life is unsustainable and can’t continue.

In the end, after an extremely harrowing drive through most of Oklahoma, I am safe in Amarillo, Texas, enjoying relative comfort. And the stimulus bill passed by a definitive margin. We got an additional $3 billion for mass transit, and the open access requirements for broadband investment survived the House vote, meaning we’re one step closer to net neutrality becoming law. While the clucking chickens of the Beltway claim Obama’s victory came at the cost of “bipartisanship,” the fact remains that he got the biggest spending bill in our history out of the starting gate barely a week into his first term. That’s change you can believe in.

But what it doesn’t change is the fact that people are dead, thousands are without the basic amenities they need to live, and the Republicans voted en masse to ensure that disasters like these happen again.

It’s going to be a cold winter for the country indeed if that’s the case. Do Republicans really want Americans to suffer, alone in the dark?