I think the GOP and its backers have to decide if they want to live in a country or in a conglomeration of medieval city-states. What is emerging as a Republican philosophy, (They would deny to the death that they had anything as intellectual as a philosophy) is a picture of 50 little fiefdoms linked only by a military force and governed by individual corporate boards of governors. It’s the perfect right-wing picture. Texas would be ruled by EXXON, Michigan by a triumvirate of Ford, GM & Chrysler, New Jersey by Hess, Louisiana by an American subsidiary of BP, Colorado by he Koch brothers, Kansas & Iowa by Monsanto, New York by Wall Street, etc.
At least we would all know, without confusion, who was ruling us. 50 foot high images of the Kochs would dominate the slopes in Aspen, proclaiming them to be the modern Borgias. It’s a wonderful picture if you happen to have been a fan of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia but for the rest of us it’s a horror show where the oligarchs reign and the rest of us are their slaves.
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In another example of Christian Charity, Trinity Church and its Episcopal clergy have taken it upon themselves to push the prosecution of the OWS demonstrators who occupied an unused piece of land that the church owns in lower Manhattan. This is the burgeoning hypocrisy of contemporary, which preaches Christian of values from the pulpit on Sundays, (keep those donations coming) and lives another set the rest of the week just to prove that Protestants can be as cynical as the Catholic, Jews and Muslims.
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Romney and the Republicans tout the Keystone XL pipeline that will run through the US’s biggest aquifer. They tell us it is safe and will bring jobs. The job part is complete fallacy (read lies). It will in fact create a few temporary jobs but most of the work will be done by Canadian contractors and will use Canadian workers.
The real lie is in the safety of the process and it is being revealed, even as we argue over it, in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada where keystone workers are fighting to clean up over a quarter of a million gallons of the most toxic oil on the planet, the result of three spills over the last few months. The biggest spill occurred near Red Deer in central Alberta, earlier this month when 475,000 liters of oil leaked into the Red Deer River. The latest spill was in northwestern Alberta near Elk Point where Embridge confirmed a spill of 239,000 liters from its pumping station on the Athabasca pipeline. Embridge the tar sands giant was involved in an earlier spill when a pipeline in Marshall, Michigan ruptured spilling 819,000 gallons.
This is happening at a time when the pipeline giants are trying, desperately, to put on a good face. Can you imagine what it will be like after they get the contracts and no longer have to worry about anything as mundane as poisoning the water of he Midwestern states?
TransCanada’s own analysis shows that the existing KeystoneXL pipeline would have “11 significant spills” over a 50 year period. Are you listening? The company itself expects 11 spills and that’s their best estimate. An independent study predicts at least 91 spills over the same period. This is more than supported by the fact that the first leg of the Keystone pipeline suffered 12 spills in 2010 alone, a record for a pipeline in the first year of operation. This isn’t just because Keystone is sloppier than anybody else, but maybe they are, and maybe we should look to another company to install any pipeline that runs through US soil. A recent study found an average of 22 large oil spills every year between 2005 and 2009. Oil spills are just part of doing business with oil companies.
Despite all this information, there are still American’s trying to get this disaster of a pipeline built right through one of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the nation. These people are either insane or criminally greedy. They must be stopped at any cost. Or are we really looking to poison the water of all the people and animals in the mid-west?
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I’ve had a lot to say about politicians, especially Republicans lying to the American people and this Sunday I saw the perfect example. Rick Perry was being interviewed on face the Nation and in the first thirty seconds of his interview he made 4 flat out lies. Now we all know Perry isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier but doesn’t he have someone on his staff who can tell him that when he makes a prepared statement on TV that is should contain some grain of truth? We all know that Hitler invented the big lie. It seems that the current Republican party is striving to perfect it.
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Let’s talk about how to get Wall Street back on track. We’re not speaking about industry here, we’re not speaking about businesses that employ thousands of workers and produce a product that may be essential to other industries or consumers. We’re speaking about an industry whose only product is money, and that has, for the last quarter century been very busy screwing up the country and being the principal object of our fiscal downfall.
So how do we slow them down, make them pay attention to investment safety, make them ante up and do their fair share? Simple. We charge them a tax on every speculative trade they make. This isn’t a new idea, France has just passed a statute covering this, but it is one that has fallen by the wayside amid frantic attempts by everyone in the financial industry to make it go away at all costs. I’m not talking about a big tax. We don’t need a big tax because the numbers of speculative trades that are made every day are mind-boggling. No tax could be miniscule, say fifty cents on every one hundred dollars of trading, nothing, a flea spec on the side of a barn but estimates put the revenue from such a tax at over $300 billion a year. That’s serious money. You could pay off a national debt in a hurry with that coming in each year. You could hire a hell of a lot of teachers, help pay off Pell grants reduce the drag of Medicare and Medicaid, institute some serious infrastructure projects and all without hurting anyone.
Oh, Jamie Dimon and his buddies may have to cut their yearly bonuses from $23 million all the way down to say $10 million but in the interests of a better America, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind. What’s one less yacht to worry about?
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As the government looks around for new sources of income that will not get the Republican’s to turn green about their anti-tax pledges, one industry stands out like a shinning beacon. That industry or those three industries, are the ones that deal in fossil fuels. That’s right, oil, gas and coal, not only pollute our entire planet but make trillions in the process. They are not particularly labor intensive; even coal is getting less so with the new strip-mining techniques, I read recently that there are only 80,000 people employed by the coal industry at this time. But as I said, these industries make outrageous sums of money. So why are they getting subsidies and tax breaks? Why are we subsidizing these shorted sighted leaches who are destroying the planet and killing our children?
Maybe it’s because every time we threaten to remove their subsidies or tax or regulate them they threaten to leave, threaten to abandon the few workers and their families that still depend on them, threaten to walk out on communities that they have built up in the polluted areas around their mines, wells or drilling sites, threaten to stop producing the fuel our nation needs because their lobbyists have fought so hard to stop any kind of alternative fuel development. And we always back down. The rest of us take pity on the people who work for these greedy polluters and let them off the hook. Why? Where are they going?
The answer is nowhere. They have been running a con game for years based on the ignorance and dishonesty of the governments that we have been paying to regulate and tax them. Unlike other industries that can pick up their factories and move them to another state or country the fossil fuel business is at the mercy of nature. It depends on mineral deposits that have been created by billions of years of nature and are not about to move themselves because of the whims or even the needs of those who have made trillions off them.
Fossil fuels are reasonably scarce and a great deal of money and time are expanded in the finding of them. You can’t just pick up a coal mine or an oil field and move it to the next state. They are tied to specific geological conditions and they are where they are. The idea that an oil or gas company is going to leave a developed field because their subsidies are lifted or they suddenly face additional regulations is absurd. All we need is politicians who aren’t on the take and have the stones to oppose those that are; legislators who will lift the unnecessary subsidies, pass much needed regulation and tax the living crap out of these polluters.
The oil and gas industries have, through the mouths of their right wing butt boys accused Obama of allowing gas prices to rise so as to enable the development of alternative fuels. I don’t know if that’s true or just another Republican lie but it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to me. Yes it will hurt but it will eventually let our kids and their kids breathe in a world that big oil and big gas and big coal is killing in the name of short-term profit.
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We must make our media completely transparent and we can’t do that as long as it is owned, by the same corporations whose interests it is investigating.
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We must protect whistle blowers for they are the ultimate source of transparency in government. Julian Assange & Bradley Manning are heroes, not traitors for they have sought to show the American people and the Citizens of the world how the Pentagon and its government associates try to hide what they are doing in the name of corporate power or military classification. I understand perfectly why the Pentagon wants to crush Assange and Manning but if we ever want to have any assurance that our government is acting according to the principals that we espouse we must make sure that they and others like them survive and prosper.