SILVER LININGS

The Air Car

Obama’s advisor on the transition team, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, made a very salient point on the economic crisis and the importance of saving the auto industry, the employer of three million people with about two and a half million more in dependent services.

Naomi Klein made a great case for the existence of a Shock Doctrine technique wherein the neocon, military-industrial complex uses real and manufactured crises to gain more intrusive control of the population’s freedoms in trade for security against the fears kept alive by propaganda during the lulls.

While listening to Reich's interview with Rachel Maddow, I realized that President-elect Obama has an opportunity to completely reverse the shock and use the economic recession, cum depression, to initiate a Boost Doctrine, to use any bailout to be the leverage needed to make a fully capable car industry heed the need to design for alternative energy rather than their century long lock step partnership with the oil industry. Three crises well quelled: unemployment, oil dependence and pollution.

While we have them retooling for ecology we should address the raw material consumption cars are and give incentives to make cars be recyclable or last longer and be updatable, like the original Volkswagens.

This economic crisis may be the same kind of blessing in disguise in many other areas as Barack is handed George’s lemons right off the Bush Doctrine — and makes lemonade.