> With all due respect, high energy
>bills are more likely to get people into the streets than the 150th
>anniversary edition of "Capital."
We've heard this sort of thing a million times in a million variants, and still people ain't in the streets. My favorite of these is the Alinsky-style community organizers who claim that organizing people around stoplights will somehow lead to a great transformation. It hasn't. It fits in with the pragmatic, anti-intellectual, and fundamentally static orthodoxy of mainstream American politics. Let's not think about anything larger than the immediate issue; let's roll up our sleeves, dispense with all this smarty-pants talk, and get down to business! And so nothing ever changes....
And U.S. energy bills aren't "high" by any stretch of the imagination. We've got some of the lowest energy prices in the world, and I think a gallon of gas is about the cheapest it's ever been in real terms in the last 50 years. Gasoline is cheaper than bottled water, for god's sake.
Doug