Where would anyone in Congress have acquired such skills, and what would have encouraged them to do so?

However, I disagree with the implication that this administration has the skills but “lacks the will for long-term comprehensive planning..” Does anyone out there want this federal government doing any long-term comprehensive planning for them? I just want this federal government to go home.

I’d rather we didn’t let them talke all the money with them, and that’s a very real problem, but I’d be relieved right now if they just went home. We shouldn’t fantasize that it’s gonna be that easy, especially since they’ve got all the money, and that’s a real problem. Antonia Yujas has won some astounding victories at making some of give some back, and I’d like to hear more about how she and her allies won them. Hers is a kind of political interference I’d like to see much more of.

I’d also like to see a lot more interference and organization, not by competing campaign donors but, at the grassroots level.

The last thing I wanta see is George Bush, Inc., or anymore federal syndicatos, deciding they’ve gathered enough force around them to announce that we’ve reached “a juncture where a policy commission (cabinet level?) needs to be established insulated from political interference, whose function and charge extend beyond a particular adminisitration.” That sounds way too Homeland Security for me.

Does anyone imagine that, if this administration were any more “insulated from political interference” than it already is, it would suddenly defend us from our own short-sighted folly with some sort of green, environmentally fierce, authoritarianism, and humane disaster management? Like its response to the hurricane and flood almost two years ago now? Or like George Bush’s long-awaited commitment to stop global warming, which inspired him to say that he wanted to find some cleaner ways of burning coal, after which California Senator Barbara Boxer said breathlessly that “this is so exciting”?

I don’t mean to foster despair here. I live in the City of San Francisco and this place has a far uglier underbelly than I ever realized before the past few years, but our Board of Supervisors also just passed some long and hard won legislation to begin building muncipal solar, wind, and tidal power, a major infrastructural undertaking.

And my own neighbors and neighborhood merchants are organizing in the interests of fair trade, energy efficiency, and clean power. We’re even talking about drilling up some of our sidewalks to plant some green stuff in their place.

There’s a farmer’s market at the center of my neighborhood on Saturdays, and the kids at my favorite convenience store are poring over lists of wholesalers that sell fair trade, organic coffee and cocoa, and unbleached paper products. This kind of very concrete, day-to-day grassroots organization makes me hopeful.

Insulating the wealth and power already vastly concentrated at the federal level is not, by nature, a green project.

How’s about we instead be honest about what kind of fix we’re in, of who all’s making, and for what purposes, and, make the distribution of power, both political and energetic ne of our most fundamental goals. The distribution of power is essentially equivalent to the distribution of dignity, which is not to say that those who want so much power of every sort, all to themselves, have much of that.