| It was paradigmatic, really. Just as the Bush Administration came to power via a breath-taking act of law-breaking on a scale never imagined before, it is leaving with a flurry of actions from the questionable to the obviously illegal, clearly thumbing its nose at the very concept of the rule of law. Laws are for little people. Like Tim DeChristopher. Or maybe not. He seems to be causing a bit of consternation. Which is all to the good.
It started with the auction itself, where he not only took 13 parcels off the market by "buying" them himself, but also drove up the price on others, as AP reported:
The process was thrown into chaos and the bidding halted for a time before the auction was closed, with 116 parcels totaling 148,598 acres having sold for $7.2 million plus fees.
"He's tainted the entire auction," said Kent Hoffman, deputy state director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Utah.
Hoffman said buyers will have 10 days to reconsider and withdraw their bids if they think they paid too much.
Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old University of Utah economics student, said his plan was to disrupt the auction and he feels he accomplished his goal.
DeChristopher won the bidding on 13 parcels, auction records show, and drove up the price of several other pieces of land.
"I thought I could be effective by making bids, driving up prices for others and winning some bids myself," the Salt Lake City man said.
Some bidders said they were forced to bid thousands of dollars more for their parcels, while others fumed that they lost their bids.
"We were hosed," said Jason Blake of Park City, a consulting geologist who was outbid on a 320-acre parcel. "It's very frustrating. I hope the guy is prosecuted."
Ah yes! The righteous rage of the insider hogs momentarily edged away from the public trough by a mere citizen! How dare he interrupt the ritual raiding of the public lands?
dday commented on this yesterday:
Huh? Paid TOO MUCH? If a buyer is paying millions of dollars for oil-rich land, they obviously think it's worth it. What DeChristopher did was prove that the BLM was giving away federal land, basically owned by the taxpayers, to noncompetitive interests at obscenely low rates, and that the bidders would clearly pay more if forced. I thought these capitalists believed in the free market?
which, of course, is an excellent point. Markets are always like this, they're "competetive" only within bounds that are socially determined in various ways, ways that economists like to pretend simply don't exist.
When the social determination takes the form of a gentlemen's agreement on the range of acceptable, absurdly low prices to pay for oil, gas, or mineral leasing rights, then no one says a word.
But if the social determination should take the form of a union trying to protect workers rights, or a government setting a mininum wage, so that people can actually live a decent life by the sweat of their brow? Why, it's a threat to civilization as we know it!
This is one of the great games afoot in the not-to-be-mentioned clashing of ideologies: exactly what types of social determinations should and/or shall have a role in determining the parameters of market competition.
DeChristopher himself had some thoughts on that, which he shared a few hints of in his Democracy Now! interview.
First though, there's the delicious irony that it was the very helter-skelter lawlessness of the hurried lease sale that made the disruption possible:
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: Well, basically, the Bush administration was trying to rush through this auction as quickly as possible to get it done before Obama took office, because they knew that it wouldn't be acceptable under any other administration other than Bush and Cheney. And so, they just circled vast swaths of southern Utah. Their initial announcement, they included pieces of property that had houses on them in Moab and included property that they didn't even have rights to drill in or they didn't have rights to sell off and included a lot of areas around national parks. And so, they rushed through the process and didn't have time to do adequate environmental impact statements, didn't have time to take an adequate amount of public comment or even input from other federal agencies. And there was a big battle with the National Park Service, because they were upset over a lot of areas that were included in there. But luckily, they also didn't have time to make sure that all the bidders were bonded, which is how I got in so easily.
Regarding the companies whose bids he drove up, he told Amy Goodman:
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: My impression of that is that those oil companies can give that back if they feel like they purchased it in any kind of way that's not acceptable to them, because I happened to drive the cost of their oil up a little closer to what the actual cost of producing oil is and the actual external costs that all the rest of us are going to have to pay.
What's this about external[ized] costs?
TIM DeCHRISTOPHER: No, and, you know, I wouldn't expect them to come out and make any official statement. Some of my professors, a lot of students have contacted me and expressed their support. The professors, especially, have been really supportive and have joined my team so far. And, you know, they kind of did their job beforehand. They kind of did their job in getting me ready for this and committing me to hold true to my values and in teaching me what was going on. In fact, the final exam that I took on Friday morning, one of the questions was about this oil sale and about, if only the oil companies were bidding on this land, are they actually going to be paying the real price for the production of oil? And, of course, the answer that the professor was expecting is no, they're not, because there's a lot of external costs that all of us have to pay for the production of oil that aren't included in those. So they did their part ahead of time in putting me where I needed to be.
I've written before about externalized costs. They are a big deal here in the LA/Long Beach harbor area. The extreme low-ball estimate is that the two ports externalize at least $3.5 billion in costs annually, primarily in the form of premature deaths, and health care costs, with some blight, traffic congestion and other various unpleantries tossed in for good measure. A more reasonable measure is probably two to three times that. The total externalized costs of goods movement in California is around $30 billion per year, and the local ports, together with the goods movement corridors leading away from them, are far and away the largest single contributor to that total. If the businesses involved were required to pay anything close to their true costs of doing business, they would all close overnight.
Sound familiar? It should. Because our entire economy is like that: it's unsustainable. Running on borrowed time. Because the true costs are not being paid. They're being shifted into the lungs of infants, toddlers, and schoolkids that I see everywhere I go. Or they're being left for future generations. There are all sorts of ways, all sorts of places you can shift your costs to, if you've got the right connections.
There is a real moment of opportunity here, if we are big enough to sieze it--an opportunity to fundamentally change our economy from one that runs on whatever it can get its hands on to one that is indefinitely sustainable, one that can last for thousands and thousands of years.
It will be a painful transtion, to be sure. But hey, we're already in pain right now. And it will be even more painful when the whole shebang comes to an end. The end of empires is always painful like that. So it will actually be a whole lot less painful if take advantage of our current situation to rebuild in a way that can be sustainable forever. We don't have to be incredibly wasteful, and we don't have to be an empire anymore. We can be what America was always supposed to be: a republic. One that each generation passes on to the next as a sacred, and secular trust.
But that can only happen if there are those, like Tim DeChristopher willing to take direct action in the face of direct evil. |
