Najarian announced the beginning of his term to colleagues and the audience at Glendale’s council meeting June 30, saying, “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure Glendale and our region gets its fair share of transportation dollars to help us break the cycle of dependency on crude oil. We have great projects in the works – subways, light rail, transit lines, van pools, etc., and I will keep you posted.”

Also on June 30, as LA Now reported, a state Court of Appeals decision ratified the California Transit Association’s lawsuit over state siphoning of mass transit funds to balance the budget.

Najarian’s response to my email query on the decision: “The MTA applauds the court of Appeal’s ruling in the CTA case. It is important that the legislature realize that transportation money is just that…money for transportation! The State has already indicated that they will appeal the ruling, so a final decision by the Supreme Court may be months away, but it nevertheless sends a strong message to Sacramento that transportation funds can not be their slush fund to patch holes in the state budget. The MTA remains comitted to give LA County residents transportation options that do not involve the single passenger automobile.”

Friedman Also Comments on Energy Independence, Alternative Transportation

Concerning crude oil dependency and alternative transportation projects, council member Laura Friedman spoke along the same lines at the June 30 meeting. Friedman had just attended the Los Angeles Building Council’s annual sustainability summit. She noted that the local business community has begun to realize that our economic, ecological and energy crises present opportunities for innovation, job creation and efficiencies that will provide long-term benefits.

Friedman went on to deplore the billion dollars a day the U.S. sends to the middle east for crude oil: “That’s money that really should be staying in the U.S. While we are in this crisis, to be exporting our wealth for crude oil when there are alternatives available is really pretty incredible. As these new technologies come online, because we do have the brainpower in California we can kill two birds with one stone. We can not only create new businesses and new industry … but we can also now keep that wealth in California and in the US. There is a very clear nexus btween local policies that we have or don’t have in terms of alternative transportation, complete streets, [policies and programs] that will keep people from using cars, and national security and national wealth. That’s one of the reasons why its so important that we take as many actions as we can at the local level to be as aggressive as we can in terms of conservation … not only does it improve our local quality of life but it improves our national security in very direct and obvious ways.”

Glendale’s options in this recession show the amount of control cities (and their citizens) have effectively ceded to higher levels of government.

Glendale rushed to apply for, and received, federal stimulus grants for several public works projects as the recent downturn hit city revenues.

Plans to bring jobs and revenues to Glendale revolve around use of redeveloment funds and tax credits which come from the federal and state government. Most leaders in this country (with exceptions now forced to reconsider) work within the system, competing for funds that come with strings attached.

American business innovators have often started small, but learned to work the system, whatever it might be. Financial sector reform, energy independence policies, and universal health care, each of them massive projects with correspondingly massive implications for local economies, are all being shaped by debate right now as top down directives for the country. Meanwhile, the impetus for future economic growth is likely to come from the bottom up, and local governments like Glendale should do all they can to foster it (stopping short of secession).

One of my questions about our current system of health care payments and proposed changes is, “Why should answers from the insurance lobby be part of any important debate?” (Truthdig published this opinion on the subject today.)

To sidetrack the whole discussion, why not get the perspective of a clean energy activist? I’ve been reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman, and came across the excerpt below on health care innovations versus energy innovations. What it reveals is that the profit motive has driven real advances in health care technology. (The profit motive has also led insurance companies to continually raise premiums, restrict access to care, and deny payments for some of these innovations.)

Friedman, in Hot, Flat and Crowded, Chapter 11, The Stone Age Didn’t End Because We Ran Out of Stones:

…Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric…has worked for General Electric for twenty-six years. In those twenty-six years, he has seen “eight or nine” generations of inovation in medical technology in GE’s health care business – in devices like X-ray equipment, MRIs, or CAT scans – because the government and the health ecare market created prices, incentives, and competition that drove a constant flow of invention. It was very profitable to innovate in this field and fairly easy to jump in. But in power? said Immelt. One – one generation of real innovation is all that he has seen.

“Today, on the power side,” said the GE chairman, “we’re still selling the same basic coal-fired power plants we had when I arrived.They’re a little cleaner and more efficient now, but basically the same model.”

Nine generations of innovation in health care – one in power systems. What does that tell you? It tells you that you have a market that simply has not been shaped to produce clean energy innovation.

Would the health, and savings, of Americans be threatened by redirecting some incentives for health care advances toward clean energy? Can this country afford to stop treating the health care system as something to be protected for the sake of shareholders? What if the amount of attention and money spent on protecting the status quo in health care payment systems went into creating venture capital for clean energy innovations?