3/18/2002
We've already seen how many useful and relatively cheap programs have been gutted in favor of defense spending, and that spending tops the list of money freely given to corporations. But there's plenty more, a sampling of which follows. These are all reminders of what can happen to a government when lobbying and campaign finance become professions in their own right and burgeon into fullblown Enron-style government ownership. Suddenly national law starts to tax money out of our pockets and pour it directly into the coffers of the corporations who bought the lawmakers. Here's how.
The biggest domestic oilfield in the US is in Alaska. So is the biggest wilderness, protected by law. The wilderness and the oil fields are in the same place. Oil companies (and, oddly, Alaskans) want to drill the oil and sell it. The official rationale for opening it up to drilling is that it would help wean us from oil controlled by volatile countries that frequently hate us; a quick look at the following few items, though, shows pretty clearly that the very people in favor of drilling in Alaska are actually fiercely opposed to anything that might actually wean us off of oil. Why? Because they're all owned by oil companies. Certainly you don't see any of them offering to actually pull out of the middle east.
The oil folks swear that drilling would leave the pristine ANWR barely marked--but as this pithy article shows, that's a load of crap even as regards the drilling operations themselves. And it stinks worse when you factor in the roads and the roadside development--all of which would be there to stay.
The bill didn't make it, in that form; there was too much outcry against it. Lest you think legislation is out of your hands.
What it says. The government gives Occidental Petroleum money to build a pipeline in Colombia. Why? Not for any reason to do with the public weal, certainly.
Big oil doesn't like alternative energy--so its pet legislators don't like it either.
Environmentalists who snarl at SUVs and semis (me, for example) need to be reminded from time to time that jetliners use so much fuel per passenger as to dwarf even the most wasteful monstrosities on the highway. And the airlines themselves are an oddly influential force in Washington--so when, instead of getting a harsh rebuke for their lax security, they got a great big bundle of cash to make it through their tough times, it came as no great surprise.
Humans are an amazing breed of problem-solvers. We positively flourish under strict constraints, producing inspiring successes. We can make an airplane that circles the globe without refueling. We send delicate probes into space that last years and mind-numbing distances longer than demanded. When something about the task at hand requires that we knuckle down and meet aggressive standards, we manage it. Apart from the inexplicable and catastrophic money sink of nuclear missile defense systems, we virtually never fail to accomplish whatever technical feat of design we decide to undertake.
What I'm getting at is the idea--perennially espoused by legislators who oppose even the most tepid efforts to tighten standards on motor vehicle fuel efficiency--that raising the bar is just too hard, too much too soon, too demanding for poor old creaky Detroit. It's just not time yet for such desperate measures.
Well, that's a load of hooey. We already know exactly how to make cars that would be incomparably superior to conventional ones in every respect. Detroit can and will beat whatever standard we set for them--but since they don't want to venture any experimental money until they have to, they're waiting for the word from on high before leaving behind their tried-and-true. The day Congress fires the starting gun, imposing a cutoff date for selling sloppy cars, the design machine in Detroit will spin up and hit the new standard in no time. Even if the standard were three times, ten times, as demanding as anything that's ever been proposed in Congress to date.
So don't hand me that sorry old line. When lukewarm reforms in emissions standards go down in flames--at the hands of Democrats and Republicans alike--you might as well say "we did this because our oil-baron owners told us to. They only like cars that pointlessly burn gobs of oil."
So Congress likes cars and jet planes, just as the oil execs do. So it's no surprise that they don't like trains--because even the lousiest train, gouting black smoke into the sky as it tugs itself along, even a turn-of-the-century train, uses only a tiny fraction of the fuel per passenger per distance that cars do. And good trains--not our reprehensibly primitive trains, but the beautiful systems laced through Europe and Japan--those are the cleanest, cheapest, safest, most reliable transportation systems we've ever created (well, sailboats are cleaner). Only planes, most wasteful of all, are faster.
In 1997 Amtrak was given an ultimatum--a preposterous ultimatum--that it must show a profit by 2002 or be dismantled. Now that judgement is almost due.
Now, understand--no transportation system in the world breaks even. The government lavishes much more money on cars and planes as it is than on trains--our roads seem free, indeed we rebel at the idea of toll roads, but roads demand many times the maintenance that rails do, at many times the cost--and roads take up orders of magnitude more space. The government bails the airlines out of financial trouble constantly--why? Because they're such a national treasure? But the railroads, which never really got properly started in the US, are given very little support by the government--and very soon, interstate passenger rail may be destroyed altogether by an act of legislature--in payment for a failure to transcend a wicked and inexplicable double standard.
Inexplicable, that is, by any measure except the all-important yardstick of oil profits. Rail is under fire because rail is a deadly threat to big oil.
For decades, there have been some important rules on communications ownership: one company could not own both the medium and the message in the same city, and one company could not cover more than thirty percent of the total market. There are being cast aside now, leaving the FCC with virtually nothing to enforce, and AOL Time Warner with nothing in its way. We could in short order see a rash of mergers leaving us with all broadcast communications (and internet) in the country controlled by one company. The potential for censorship, I trust, is obvious.
If it isn't, consider that ABC has been fighting to dump Nightline (a pretty good news program) for Letterman--not, as this article points out, because Letterman gets better ratings, but because advertisers make more money off of his comercial breaks. Like the shelves at Barnes&Noble where only the bestsellers of recent years stay on display, this is an example of an inadvertent sort of censorship that happens when one shop's strictly mercantile tastes become the only game in town.
The proposal is to use a Nevada mountain as the primary burial ground for nuclear wastes in the US--even though all the studies of the site that were done in advance found that it's a terribly insecure place. Not to mention it means radioactive wastes will be traveling in trucks on the highway from all over the country (ever see a truck wreck? Ever?) and all so the unthinkably dangerous and remarkably expensive nuclear energy industry can remain in place. On the taxpayers' tab.
We're all about free trade and globalization, except when it isn't working for American corporations. But government hypocrisy is not the point; that misidentifies the actors. The very consistent motive is that of the corporations, who will use American law or open the path for using foreign laws instead, whichever seems to increase their profits in any given case.
The government truly seems to have forgotten that it is not a corporate employee. Even when it does punish corporations, it gives them preferential treatment by keeping their reputations untarnished.