Barackface

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

A Few Hours At The Reshma 2010 Headquarters

I dropped by at the Reshma 2010 headquarters for a few hours earlier in the evening. It is on Madison Avenue between 31st and 32nd.

I made 100 phone calls. About 21 of them went through. Then I picked up some literature to go work a subway stop. Aaron suggested the 23rd Street stop. Once I got there though I decided on a change in plan. I walked over to Little India. I was going to leave the literature at the various stores. I was so impressed that the campaign had been all those places before me. The first store I walked into, they already had Reshma 2010 literature on full display. It is not often that an Indian American runs for Congress. And you could feel the quiet pride the people felt.

It was that same thing I felt talking to a lot of elderly white women on the phone. They said they were for Maloney. I respect that, I said each time, and meant it. These were women who would be home when others were at work.

Similarly I can see how Reshma appeals to young professional women, and to young professionals in general. I have been trying to figure out what the Reshma style is, for Obama that has been the new kind of politics, one that is about positivity. Reshma's style is in formation, sure. But I think it relies much on sheer excellence. You work very hard. You do the best work you can. You raise the most money. You flesh out the best policy proposals. That style can appeal to professionals in general, men and women alike. Her appeal is based on excellence.

Reshma is intellectually challenging in a way Maloney is not. Maloney is safely pro-choice. Reshma is pro-choice plus. Maloney's generation tried their best, and they did good work, but they have not achieved equality for women. Reshma's task begins where Maloney's ends. Maloney's best is but Reshma's foundation. This is not a race to demolish Maloney. This is a race to succeed Maloney. This race is about suggesting Maloney's best has not been good enough, and so a more capable, more energetic person needs to step in.

And that applies to more than gender. The thing to note is not that finally some work is being done on the Second Avenue subway line, but why it took so long. That subway line has been a work in progress the entire time Maloney has been in Congress. That is not my idea of excellence.

Maloney has been safely Democratic. The leaders in Congress have not had to fear she might go vote with the Republicans. But she has not been any sort of a guiding light. She has not been that Congressperson who Democrats in various parts of the country have quoted. She has been humho. She has been mediocre. She has been "ordinary," as the Washington Post article described her. Only today I realized that article in the Post was on its front page. I read it online, so I did not realize if it was on the front page, or where it was.

Not only is this Reshma-Maloney race the most talked about race in the state of New York, it also has attracted national attention.

At the Niagara falls, the water collects, and collects, and collects, and then the waterfall part happens. At this point we are in the water collecting part of the campaign. I suggested that metaphor to Aaron and to Reshma while at the office.

There is much joy in talking to voters on the phone: you hear all sorts of unexpected stuff. One voter said, I don't like to get my political information on the phone, can you please send it to me in the mail instead? Another said, I need a number I can call so I can get my information.

My final call went something like this.

"Have you heard of Reshma?"

"Yes."

"Will you be voting for her on September 14?"

"Yes."

There were quite a few people who said, I have heard of her, but I don't know enough about her to decide one way or the other.

There is much joy to meeting people in person.

And on my way out Aaron told me Reshma was on Bloomberg TV today. I need to get the YouTube clip for that, I said.

We did the petition thing, Megan said with quiet pride. You sure did. That was a lot of work.

I try to offer some strategic thinking digitally. And that is fun. But it is in talking to and meeting people where the big fun part is. I told Aaron I will try to show up once a week for that fun part.

Bloomberg Video: Saujani Sees Private Sector Jobs Crucial To Recovery

Monday, July 12, 2010

BP

BURBANK, CA - FEBRUARY 01: An Exxon gas stati...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

There is a great article in the New York Times about BP. There is a panoramic feel to the article. It tries to look at BP from many different angles. I am going to quote from it at length, and I am going to comment on it.

New York Times: In BP’s Record, a History of Boldness and Costly Blunders

Despite a catalog of crises and near misses in recent years, BP has been chronically unable or unwilling to learn from its mistakes, an examination of its record shows. ...... In little more than a decade, BP grew from a middleweight into the industry’s second-largest company, behind only Exxon Mobil, with soaring profits, fat dividends and a share price to match. ...... From its base in London, the company struck bold deals in politically volatile areas like Angola and Azerbaijan and pushed technology to the limit in the remotest reaches of Alaska and the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico — “the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do,” as its chief executive, Tony Hayward, once put it. ....... an incredibly complicated set of events with individual decisions and equipment failures that led to a very complicated industrial accident ...... BP was born in 1908 when a rich Englishman named William Knox D’Arcy struck oil in Iran and formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Treating the locals as little more than imperial subjects, the company, partly owned by the British government, expanded across the region, its fortunes intertwined with those of the British Empire. ........ Unlike some of his more cautious competitors, Mr. Browne ignored small projects and went after the riskiest, most expensive and potentially most lucrative ventures — “elephants,” in industry jargon. Under him, BP’s share price more than doubled and its cash dividend tripled, making it a darling of investors. ....... he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords ....... “I transformed a company, challenged a sector, and prompted political and business leaders to change.” ...... March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City. ...... A year later, there was a new calamity: 267,000 gallons of oil leaked from BP’s network of pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. ....... The near sinking of Thunder Horse in 2005 was caused by a shockingly simple mistake: a check valve had been installed backward

My first reaction when the disaster struck was to try to put it on the geopolitical map. This was an environmental 9/11 with no Bin Laden in the picture. No one person could be blamed, but an entire civilization should be.

But I have only a layperson's knowledge of the details, of what has happened, of what all happened that led to the crisis in the first place.

This has been an accident. This is the magnitude of the Space Shuttle exploding. This was big. And when something like this happens, there is a lot of Monday quarterbacking. Cleaning up had to happen. BP needed to compensate those who needed to be compensated. But this disaster could not be measured in dollar terms.

Money is in the human realm. Money, stock prices, business cycles are human, they are artificial. What had happened was at that borderline where humanity interacts with Mother Nature. The entire pond that is the Gulf had been messed up for a long, long time. There is no cleaning that. There is no compensating that.

I have seen a lot of diagrams and a lot of amateur videos suggesting how best to unplug the leaks. They all have uniformly missed one fundamental point. The pressures at those depths are huge. You are not at sea level pressure.

We saw the oil that surfaced. But we will never account for the Amazon forests we have destroyed down there. We know much more about outer space than we do about our ocean depths.

Too bad this is how democracy works. We need a big accident like this one to jolt the population to seriously start thinking in terms of a zero emissions future. You need something this big, and this bad to finally make the emotional connect among people to do the right thing. We should be able to do better than that. Intellectual extrapolations should be good enough reason.

BP is responsible, and it needs to take responsibility. But this goes beyond BP. The Gulf Oil Spill is a civilization level incident.

Gulf Oil Spill
A Dirty Bomb Just Went Off In The Gulf

New York Times: Cap Connector Is Installed on BP Well

a new cap that could contain all of the oil spewing from its out-of-control well in the Gulf of Mexico ..... If all goes as planned, the new cap will be lowered on top of the pipe and connected with a tight seal. ..... The new cap should eventually enable BP to contain all of the oil from the well, estimated at up to 60,000 barrels a day ..... a relief well that will be used to stop the leak and permanently seal the well was on pace to intercept the blown-out well at the end of the month, and that the procedure to stop the flow of oil by pumping mud into the well, followed by cement, could take several weeks after that.

New York Times: Tests to Determine if Cap Will Halt Oil

effectively ending the three-month gusher. ..... there could be delays, especially if ice-like crystals of methane and water form when the new cap is put on. .... Given the number of engineering efforts that have failed .... the first relief well was now only about five feet away horizontally from the runaway well.

New York Times: Anti-Car Crusade, Fueled by Gulf Spill, Takes a Station Hostage

“People have to be motivated and give up some of these comforts,” said Janel Sterbentz, a 32-year-old demonstrator from San Jose who said she had never owned a car..... an opportunity to push the environmental movement further — beyond merely green, mass transit first, or pro-cycling. ...... For some, the mission now is anti-car. ..... “We need to use less fossil fuels,” he said. “We need to have simpler lives.” .... “We need to treat people who are addicted to their cars like people with an illness, people who are sick, rather than people who are intentionally destroying the planet,” he said. ...... He has not owned a car since 1999 and stopped flying in 2006 when he took trains and a cargo ship to travel to graduate school in England. ....... the toll automobiles take on society is greater than drivers pay. ...... “Would they have said to the abolitionists, ‘You should tone down the rhetoric?’ ”