David Brooks is trying to do his best to help the Romney campaign, but apparently he hasn't been getting the memos. Brooks' column today is a diatribe against measures to promote clean energy. (That would be socialist items like tax credits for retrofitting buildings, solar panels, or fuel efficient cars. The same sorts of policies that were promoted under President Bush, albeit on a smaller scale.)

There are a number of things that are not quite right in Brooks' piece, but my favorite is Brooks' assertion:

"The biggest blow to green tech has come from the marketplace itself. Fossil fuel technology has advanced more quickly than renewables technology. People used to worry that the world would soon run out of oil, but few worry about that now. Shale gas, meanwhile, has become the current hot, revolutionary fuel of the future.

... the oil and gas sector is investing a whopping $490 billion a year in exploration."

Oh no, Governor Romney has been running around the country trying to tell people how President Obama's horrible energy policy has blocked drilling for fossil fuels and sent gas prices soaring and now David Brooks is telling us that the great breakthroughs in fossil fuels and massive amounts of drilling has caused energy prices to plummet. Brooks' story is that the progress in drilling for fossil fuels in the Obama years has made clean energy uncompetitive.

This is horrible, Brooks is 180 degrees at odds with the Romney message. Someone better get Brooks with the program, even ardent Republicans might find it difficult to accept that energy prices are both too high and too low.

Okay, but there's much more fun in this Brooks column. His big gotcha indictment of Obama's clean energy program as a failure is:

Jake Johnston
AlterNet, October 17, 2012

Haiti’s leading human rights attorney Mario Joseph has been the subject of death threats and police surveillance and harassment in the past several months, along with other lawyers. As the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) reports, Josep

It's always fun when Thomas Friedman writes a piece on economics. He likes to play a game with readers. He slips a number of false assertions into the column and readers are supposed to find them. (He probably does this with his columns on foreign policy also, but I don't have time to read through those columns.)

Today's column is just chock full of these false assertions. Early on Friedman tells us:

"many Americans understand something is very wrong, that we could go the way of Greece or Japan if we don’t shape up, and that they will embrace a candidate who trusts them with the truth, that is, an honest diagnosis of where we are and how we get out of this mess."

That was really neat, go the way of Greece or Japan? That's kind of like going the way of Bernie Madoff or Warren Buffet. Greece's economy is being systematically destroyed by the conditions imposed by the European Central Bank and the I.M.F. It's unemployment rate is near 25 percent and virtually certain to go higher as virtually everyone projects at least another year of economic contraction. By contrast, the unemployment rate in Japan is just over 4.0 percent. While Greece is clearly a disaster, Japan's economy has done better in many respects than the U.S. economy over the last two decades.

His next big whopper comes one paragraph down when Friedman tells readers:

"This merger [of globalization and technology] makes old jobs obsolete faster and spins off new jobs faster, but all the good new jobs require higher skills."

This is the structural unemployment story. This one can be easily disproved because none of the facts fit. There are no major sectors of the economy with rapidly rising wages, with longer workweeks and with large numbers of job openings relative to the number of unemployed. These are all characteristics of markets with labor shortages -- the jobs requiring higher skills story that Friedman is telling. It's a cute story, there's just no evidence for it.

The second presidential debate will take place tonight at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. The topics will range from domestic to foreign policy, meaning the issue of “free” trade* is sure to come up. On this topic, there is little daylight between the two candidates. In 2008, candidates from both the Republican and Democratic Party participated in an “anti-NAFTA off”, competing in Rust Belt states that have lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), stated clearly after the election that the “results demonstrated Americans’ continued rejection of NAFTA style trade agreements."

Nevertheless, the last four years have seen a series of “NAFTA-style trade agreements” passed despite significant opposition from within the Democratic Party. President Obama has signed trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and Korea and is now negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal with at least 10 countries that Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach describes as “NAFTA-on-steroids with the world.” During the last debate, President Obama touted the trade deals as boosting exports while Romney said he would push for even more “free trade.” Wallach writes:

In an election dominated by the urgent agenda of U.S. job creation, it is a sorry statement about the domination of corporate money in American elections that both presidential candidates tout these NAFTA-style "free trade" deals. Repeated polls show that opposition to these NAFTA-style deals is one of the only issues that unites Democratic, Republican and Independent voters.