Jennifer Granholm’s War Room guests discuss the roadblocks in the way of a major new, job-creating industry in the US, the electric vehicle.
The Tea Party Congress almost closed down the government to block funding for retooling auto plants.
Granholm goes on to make a typically impassioned appeal for government support for EV manufacturing as an infant industry that is a large part of the future of employment in Michigan. She points to the success of funding for better batteries, and notes “George W. Bush passed a tax break for SUVs.”
Prof. Cole, what are the similarities to , and what are the differences from the Iranian revolution?
(If you have time)
thanks for all of the useful work you do.
wrong article, sorry.
Hopefully, after the next election, more of the tea party and right wingers will be gone from Congress.
Sadly, Michigan has a right wing legislature who spends its time attacking a woman’s right to personal freedom instead of promoting Michigan as a great to make electric cars.
All the relevant partners-carmakers, local and State governments, federal govt, all abandoned the electric car development when it was well under way and doing well, battery and all, six years ago. Get the great DVD “Who killed the electric car?”. It is well worthwhile viewing.
Tea Party hates American car companies.
Tea Party loves Big Oil.
Big Oil wouldn’t be what it is today without those car companies, and vice versa.
What’s the difference between them?
Is it that the auto industry is seen as contaminated by being located in Negro-infested Detroit, and being unionized?
Yet Big Oil is sucking all kinds of money out of the US and has, as a necessary cost of doing business, empowered all sorts of nasty regimes overseas. How is this more patriotic than what the car companies do?
Are right-wing Americans really now required to hate their 5000-lb 4×4 pickups and SUVs, yet love the foreign petroleum going into their tanks?
Or maybe… they like what Big Oil justifies. The ridiculous giant gas guzzlers Detroit built all these years exemplify the cult of American exceptionalism – but their fuel requirements DEMAND American exceptionalism: the military domination of the Middle East, dovetailing into the Crusader castle known as Israel, and the plain of Armageddon.
And that means a $750,000,000,000 annual expenditure on military matters, money that they can then demand be extracted from everything else they hate about America and modern life: social programs, poverty programs, public education, science and research. The war machine employs them in myriad bizarre little right-wing companies working on killer robots and armor for Special Forces, America’s faux knighthood.
Most of all, the movement is about helping the movement, and Big Oil helps fund it, and electric cars will replace Big Oil with new elites that might act differently, so why even take the risk when it’s so much easier to poison the air and water and terrorize the planet?
BradgBlog, turn of this century, electric cars pulled from market in Cali. Right along the time of the Grey Davis recall.
If much of America is not driving electric cars by about 2020 or 2022, it won’t be driving much at all. The countdown to cheap oil’s end is underway, whether or not Americans want to recognize the countdown.
America’s survival depends on people who can afford new cars buying electric and non-gas hog vehicles. They are not. The po’ folks are along for the ride.