OK I Went To Lunch

by: DaveJ

Fri Jun 18, 2010 at 19:03


I just got back from lunch with a guy from France, who is just astonished at the things we let the rich get away with here.  

I think Congressman Joe Barton demonstrated this week the conservative viewpoint:  Companies are supposed to tell government what to do, not the other way around, not even when the company destroys the economy and environment of a big chunk of the globe.  President Obama tried to hold BP accountable for the damage they have caused.  He got them to set up a fund to compensate victims, administered independently from BP and from the government, and this Congressman, with the Heritage Foundation, Limbaugh and the GOP caucus behind him, says this:

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. In this case a $20 billion shakedown."

Wrapping up, Barton said: "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words - amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."

According to the "taxes are theft" crowd even asking a company to pay for damage it does is a "shakedown!"  They hate the idea of government and democracy that much!  THIS from the crowd that gave Wall Street a huge, huge bailout!

I don't know what to say to this except, "Good f**king Lord!"  

But Erik Erikson, CNN commentator and blogger at RedState who knows what the conservatives say, agrees with Barton,

Let's be honest. The White House meeting with British Petroleum was a shakedown.

. . . British Petroleum commits to a $20 billion escrow account to pay for damages. The Democrats get a show trial. The government has a vested interest in ensuring BP does not go belly up lest the $20 billion go the way of the dodo bird, gas prices will probably start trickling up, and BP will pay out damages to people put on the unemployment line by Barack Obama's egregious action to shut down all deep water drilling.

So there it is.  Who is in charge here? WHo tells who what to do, We, the People or the big, powerful companies.  Progressives say that We, the People should make the decisions and control the resources.  Conservatives - the "taxes are theft" crowd - like Rand Paul say it is "un-American" for us to try to regulate how companies exploit our resources, and a "shakedown" when We, the People ask big companies to compensate the public when they cause damage.

DaveJ :: OK I Went To Lunch

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OK I Went To Lunch | 14 comments
What's really wrong (4.00 / 2)
BP should not merely set up a fund.  It should have paid crews out on beaches up and down the Gulf cleaning up their mess at their expense.  Paying claims (which it will dispute and nickel and dime) later is not enough.
Unfortunately, what the White House meeting with British Petroleum (4.00 / 3)
proves is that actual law enforcement against major transnationals is impossible given their power relative to national governments. This used to just be the case in third world countries, but now it is true everywhere. The lack of anti-trust enforcement for the last 30 years proves it, and now we're at the point that a major transnational can commit murder or worse and suffer no substantial legal penalty. Political grandstanding is all that sovereign governments have left when pitted against a big transnational.

ec=-8.50 soc=-8.41   (3,967 Watts)
This is why clean energy is so important (4.00 / 1)
The nature of oil is such that it will be a market controlled by a few massive corporations. Other forms of energy are not like that.  

That said, the greatest power that the big corporations have is our acceptance of the state of affairs you mention. Just pushing back is valuable even if it won't win this round.

Support the Youth PROMISE Act

[ Parent ]
Depends (4.00 / 1)
Other forms doesn't have to be like that.  Every house and building in America should have solar tiled roofs.  It is easy to imagine an economy where many firms make these and compete on style as much as energy efficiency.

Or, we could have huge solar farms, mega wind farms and so on, controlled by mega-corporations, mostly paid for by our tax dollars but with all profit going to the corporations.  Anyone want to predict where this country will end up?

[ Parent ]
You are right that we could (and odds are, would) (0.00 / 0)
end up like that, its not clear that it would be inevitable. Rather than just worrying about whether we have the technology, it's worth thinking about the different impacts of different kinds of technology. (Same thing as we think about the developing world - for example, clean water.) But you're right - it's not just what we seek to achieve, but how.

(Also, we need flex cars, which would be much harder for oligopolies to develop.)

Support the Youth PROMISE Act

[ Parent ]
Centralization vs Decentralization is exactly the point. (4.00 / 3)
That's why in places like SoCal, there are hardly any solar panels. They're damn expensive because the state makes it that way. It's profoundly stupid, but no solutions are allowed that don't make everyone dependent on corporations for all their energy needs.

Every county in SoCal is talking about new power plants, when simply putting photovoltaics on every rooftop would eliminate the need for several existing plants, much less push back need for new ones.

But we can't upset the corporate agenda, now can we? Even if it makes so much sense!

"We have 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. The question comes, how long do you continue before people just don't want to go back to work at all?"
--Dianne Feinstein (net worth: $75 Million+)

[ Parent ]
One major glaring exception (4.00 / 1)
Nuclear power is even more like that, i.e., a market controlled by even fewer and as massive corporations. What is more, given the dangers of waste, it requires a central controlling and militarized authority that makes BP, Shell, etc., look like a hippie commune, and does so for 10s of thousands of years.

And apparently Obama loves him some nukes as do all of the GOPers. So does corporate America, given that nuclear power has been a great source of corporate welfare and recent legislation is designed to insulate them from most liability if anything goes wrong and initiates a new round at the federal trough. It's a wet dream for corporations.

"We live entangled in webs of endless deceit, often self-deceit, but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them."

[ Parent ]
Dead right! (nt) (0.00 / 0)


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[ Parent ]
Great point! But wait, there's more! (4.00 / 1)
Nuke plants are vast, huge, enormously complex projects. They also carry with them a crap-load of RISK. As we all know, Stuff Happens. Stuff happens a nuke plants too... which is why a large nuclear facility has to be ringed with... yes, petroleum-based power plants!

Because these plants are $20-$30 Billion projects massive in scale, if one reactor goes off-line for maintenance org or--god forbid--an accident, then that production has to be immediately taken up by ancillary generators. That means natural gas or perhaps oil plants... but the start-up time has to be short. So that means additional generating capacity on hand. Unused. Except when needed.

That's not efficient in any book I've ever read.  

"We have 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. The question comes, how long do you continue before people just don't want to go back to work at all?"
--Dianne Feinstein (net worth: $75 Million+)

[ Parent ]
I mostly agree except (0.00 / 0)
I think we need to be doing everything we possibly can to fight global warming while there is still any time left at all.  And if that means building nuke plants too so be it.  As for the risk of where to store the waste, we are currently dumping the waste from burning oil and coal right into the air.  And we can build cleaner-burning reactors, and smaller-scale reactors now.  There is very little risk now of meltdown.

But these should be built and managed by the government and certainly not for profit, because then all oversight and safety becomes secondary.

--

Seeing The Forest -- Who is our economy FOR, anyway? Twitter: dcjohnson

[ Parent ]
The Largest Oil Companies ARE Countries (4.00 / 1)
The largest oil companies are essential nothing but arms of their states.  BP ranks 19th in know reserves, well below most of the big ones:

http://www.petrostrategies.org...

And BP is still called British Petroleum for a reason.

Transnational corporations are not hard to regulate, the government just has to WANT to do it. (The "hard to regulate" piss and moan is another sham excuse to allow the rich and powerful to get away with murder.)

Obama has not shown anything but a strange deference to large corporations. But don't for one second believe other countries are so stupid.  Their oil companies are often used as nothing BUT another means to implement their foreign policy goals.  

[ Parent ]
Actually, governments at least can enforce existing laws. (0.00 / 0)
In this particular case, as is customary with this administration, that is not an option. But that is a choice they make, not a matter of being forced into something. So if this administration fails to enforce existing laws, as they do all the time (how many Wall Street fraudsters have been frog-marched thus far?), it's because they choose to. They choose this, even though the law often compels them to. Still, all we hear are excuses from WH, the mediots and all the various apologists.

Thus far, all we're actually seeing from WH and congress is all kabuki. Nothing has actually happened yet that would change the existing relations between corporations and the State. This should concern everyone.

Until people flatly reject this idea that corporations "are simply too powerful," nothing will change. Nothing. Will. Change.

This too is a choice.

"We have 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. The question comes, how long do you continue before people just don't want to go back to work at all?"
--Dianne Feinstein (net worth: $75 Million+)

[ Parent ]
Corporations are more sovereign than nations (4.00 / 2)
Let's play a thought game.

Imagine that the Deep Water Horizon explosion were caused by a group of people in the name of some nation or cause.

Would folks like Barton or Erikson have a second thought about invading some nation (whether directly responsible or not), tossing out the government, and crashing the entire place into violent chaos of 10+ years? I doubt it.

But mention taking a small portion of the profit BP has made from pumping the natural resources that belong to all of us, and you are cast as some kind of anti-American anti-Christ.

Don't get me wrong. Its not like I think Hayward should be water-boarded, or made to pose naked with snarling dogs, but a few 100 hrs of community service mopping up a beach full of sludge, or helping out of work rig-workers, shrimpers, and fisherfolk find employment seems more than fair.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

the cons mantra (0.00 / 0)
privatize the profits and socialize the losses, the scum on the right do believe in socialism, who knew.
OK I Went To Lunch | 14 comments

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