The Chamber of Commerce's lead article (05/16/13) states: "The Keystone XL Pipeline is a viable remedy for many of the threats and concerns that plague small business owners."
The Chamber (and others) spread misinformation that XL will unleash lower energy prices, and create jobs. Temporarily, it might create a few jobs, but TransCanada has been transparent about its intention to sell its hydrocarbon sludge abroad. The petroleum market is world-wide and fungible, anyway; oil is basically sold at the same price, subject to world-wide demand and supply--and speculation. Canadian sludge won't drive prices down, nor even keep them from rising, if China, India and other emerging economies continue to hunger for more--as they will.
The Chamber of Commerce, pretending to represent small business, claims the XL pipeline is needed for small businesses, to promote jobs and lower energy costs. There's no mention that it's one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet, and that its addition to the fuel mix will increase global warming and climate change significantly. Nor does the Chamber mention the recent disastrous spills of this toxic mess in Nebraska and Michigan. The author of the Chamber's lead article promoting this: Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.), is Chairman, Small Business Subcommittee on Agriculture, Energy and Trade.
He sells snake oil.It's the line Republican Congressmen, from gerrymandered districts, follow, as well.
You mustn't regulate emissions, but you must protect "job creator" subsidies for Exxon, etc. and you can't let government functions out-compete "free enterprise," like the Postal Service, or Social Security.
That's really why both, plus Medicare/Medicaid, have been targeted by the GOP: Yet costs are lower, and public benefits are obvious, while corporations (or their shareholders) don't profit.
From the Chamber of Commerce rightward, there appears to be an alternate reality, and almost half of Americans have been persuaded it's real: government can't do anything good. They've been persuaded that government stimulus even during recession, will trigger galloping inflation, though inflation isn't as high as the Fed has targeted; the minimal stimulus drove us (barely) out of recession, unlike the austerity-driven EU, and the dollar has gained value against other currencies. The right-wing solution for this non-problem, is to cut government expenditures, laying off teachers and police, civil service workers and firemen, cutting government services and aid to those in need: the grand sequester.
Given austerity's dismal failure to resolve Europe's financial problems, why can't we learn from their mistakes (let alone those of FDR in 1937)? Because corporations could profit more from austerity?
The right-wing's alternative universe is wreaking a terrible toll. The only example of more damaging policies would be the Roman Senators, who ran the Fifth Century Roman Empire: they ran it into the ground.
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Who's More Corrupt?
Did you know that the "oil spill" in Arkansas over the weekend was actually tar sands (the stuff to be piped through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline)? Tar sands are probably exempt from the taxes that fund the clean up of such spills, yet this sludge is more toxic and more difficult to clean up than conventional crude.
Some interesting facts: the first, for me, was Oil Change's report, identifying the spill with Canadian tar sands. It wasn't reported that way in the New York Times, which used the euphemism "heavy crude from western Canada," nor on NPR, which simply reported it as a major oil spill until the following day.
Tar sands aren't oil. After much processing (requiring much heat, polluting more than coal), this "bitumen" sludge can be converted into an oil feedstock for further refining, but to call it "heavy crude" conceals what it really is and why a spill is much worse than conventional oil.
Toxicity is one of the reasons for blocking the XL Pipeline, which may be why even supposedly "objective" media outlets misled. Tar sands money has corrupted Canada's politics, and is adding to the endemic, legal corruption here. It may inspire right-wing billionaires, like the Kochs, to purchase media outlets like the LA Times.
Look at the contrast between India and the US: here the courts are influenced by major corporations, especially after Citizens United, and demand outrageous privileges, like patent monopolies indefinitely extended.
India is famous for its petty and not so petty corruption, personally observed when I lived there 33 years ago. Contemporary accounts imply it's as bad now. However, in some ways it might be less corrupt than the US, where corporations get anything they want, like Novartis' minor tweaking of an AIDS drug allowing indefinite monopoly protection. An Indian judge did something our Congress and courts have rarely managed: he stood up to Big Pharma, striking down Novartis' claim that its minor modification justified a new patent (monopoly protection) for the 20 years the Indian patent law permits.
In the US, regulators, courts and Congress bend over backwards to give corporations what they want--like the covert insertion of the "Monsanto protection act" into the Food bill.
The US may have fewer officials and politicians with their hands out, but the powerful use legal corruption. Their bribes are more lucrative: campaign funds, insider info, high paying jobs, and promotions when they recycle back from private to public sectors.
They are in service to our ultimate Roman Senators--the Koch brothers, Murdoch or Lockheed Martin--who know that control of the media is key.
Outside the US, people get freer news: in the US, Congress is writing a law to more strictly control the Internet, our best remaining source for a free flow of information.
Are we already a corporate state, a plutocracy like the later Roman Empire? Hard to tell with the managed information we're fed.
Some interesting facts: the first, for me, was Oil Change's report, identifying the spill with Canadian tar sands. It wasn't reported that way in the New York Times, which used the euphemism "heavy crude from western Canada," nor on NPR, which simply reported it as a major oil spill until the following day.
Tar sands aren't oil. After much processing (requiring much heat, polluting more than coal), this "bitumen" sludge can be converted into an oil feedstock for further refining, but to call it "heavy crude" conceals what it really is and why a spill is much worse than conventional oil.
Toxicity is one of the reasons for blocking the XL Pipeline, which may be why even supposedly "objective" media outlets misled. Tar sands money has corrupted Canada's politics, and is adding to the endemic, legal corruption here. It may inspire right-wing billionaires, like the Kochs, to purchase media outlets like the LA Times.
Look at the contrast between India and the US: here the courts are influenced by major corporations, especially after Citizens United, and demand outrageous privileges, like patent monopolies indefinitely extended.
India is famous for its petty and not so petty corruption, personally observed when I lived there 33 years ago. Contemporary accounts imply it's as bad now. However, in some ways it might be less corrupt than the US, where corporations get anything they want, like Novartis' minor tweaking of an AIDS drug allowing indefinite monopoly protection. An Indian judge did something our Congress and courts have rarely managed: he stood up to Big Pharma, striking down Novartis' claim that its minor modification justified a new patent (monopoly protection) for the 20 years the Indian patent law permits.
In the US, regulators, courts and Congress bend over backwards to give corporations what they want--like the covert insertion of the "Monsanto protection act" into the Food bill.
The US may have fewer officials and politicians with their hands out, but the powerful use legal corruption. Their bribes are more lucrative: campaign funds, insider info, high paying jobs, and promotions when they recycle back from private to public sectors.
They are in service to our ultimate Roman Senators--the Koch brothers, Murdoch or Lockheed Martin--who know that control of the media is key.
Outside the US, people get freer news: in the US, Congress is writing a law to more strictly control the Internet, our best remaining source for a free flow of information.
Are we already a corporate state, a plutocracy like the later Roman Empire? Hard to tell with the managed information we're fed.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
US Empire Pushes String
How do you push a string? How do you make a nation govern itself effectively, when its history of governance up until now has been tribal, feudal and by self-selected warlords?
Tomes cram libraries on development, development finance, development economics, and political development. Most should be pulped. What we don't know about development could fill many more libraries.
There are many success stories, nations like China, Japan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa and many more, but there are no notable formulas. China has used government directed markets and state promoted industrialization, but it had a very strong, effective political system before its recent successes. India has a lively, if sometimes chaotic, political system: its economic development has been more a mixture of political direction and foreign investment.
Nations like Afghanistan or Somalia or, most egregiously, the Congo, don't have the luxury of established, effective political systems.
Well-meaning Americans and Europeans try to help these nations learn to govern themselves. In the case of Afghanistan, they are doing so while also fighting a persistent insurrection/revolution on behalf of its largely dysfunctional government.
Some of the development success stories, including Vietnam, tell how revolutionary movements, anti-western, or anti-American, created the necessary political foundation for development in their countries: imposed governments did not.
From the era of colonialism until now, western, or "developed" nations have attempted to impose their kinds of governance on "less-developed" nations, sometimes for their own national interest, sometimes for more altruistic reasons. Western-style "democracies" flourished in Europe and Japan after WWII, because there had been long-established and effective governments before the war.
But consider the case of China: the allies supported a weak, corrupt authoritarian government (Chiang-kai Shek), and attempted to counter a revolutionary movement; our attempts failed. The Communist government lurched from famine, to war, to succession crises, but it also established a political system so strong that it could mobilize nearly a billion Chinese to kill off the flies in their nation--mostly by hand! That government still governs, and by adopting western-style economics, has become wildly successful.
Ours is really a post-imperial world waiting to happen: the US can only maintain its world-straddling military by borrowing from China. Yet, it can't create civil societies in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia no matter how many troops it stations in those nations. All it can do is exacerbate tensions, which favors forces of destruction, like al Qaeda.
Yet, the military has gained enough control of American policy that it continues to expand, regardless of economic distress faced at home, or lack of success abroad.
Our foreign policy goals are wildly unrealistic: you can't push a string. Continuing our military-foreign policy abroad will not create international stability; it will only impoverish and bankrupt us.
We have a choice: a vibrant nation without an empire, or a broken nation still attempting to hold onto one.
Tomes cram libraries on development, development finance, development economics, and political development. Most should be pulped. What we don't know about development could fill many more libraries.
There are many success stories, nations like China, Japan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa and many more, but there are no notable formulas. China has used government directed markets and state promoted industrialization, but it had a very strong, effective political system before its recent successes. India has a lively, if sometimes chaotic, political system: its economic development has been more a mixture of political direction and foreign investment.
Nations like Afghanistan or Somalia or, most egregiously, the Congo, don't have the luxury of established, effective political systems.
Well-meaning Americans and Europeans try to help these nations learn to govern themselves. In the case of Afghanistan, they are doing so while also fighting a persistent insurrection/revolution on behalf of its largely dysfunctional government.
Some of the development success stories, including Vietnam, tell how revolutionary movements, anti-western, or anti-American, created the necessary political foundation for development in their countries: imposed governments did not.
From the era of colonialism until now, western, or "developed" nations have attempted to impose their kinds of governance on "less-developed" nations, sometimes for their own national interest, sometimes for more altruistic reasons. Western-style "democracies" flourished in Europe and Japan after WWII, because there had been long-established and effective governments before the war.
But consider the case of China: the allies supported a weak, corrupt authoritarian government (Chiang-kai Shek), and attempted to counter a revolutionary movement; our attempts failed. The Communist government lurched from famine, to war, to succession crises, but it also established a political system so strong that it could mobilize nearly a billion Chinese to kill off the flies in their nation--mostly by hand! That government still governs, and by adopting western-style economics, has become wildly successful.
Ours is really a post-imperial world waiting to happen: the US can only maintain its world-straddling military by borrowing from China. Yet, it can't create civil societies in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia no matter how many troops it stations in those nations. All it can do is exacerbate tensions, which favors forces of destruction, like al Qaeda.
Yet, the military has gained enough control of American policy that it continues to expand, regardless of economic distress faced at home, or lack of success abroad.
Our foreign policy goals are wildly unrealistic: you can't push a string. Continuing our military-foreign policy abroad will not create international stability; it will only impoverish and bankrupt us.
We have a choice: a vibrant nation without an empire, or a broken nation still attempting to hold onto one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)