Posts Tagged by corruption
On Corruption – Continued
| March 12, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
Here’s a follow-up post to what I wrote earlier about corruption. I had a series of meetings when I was back in Washington DC a few days ago with a top-level DoD (Department of Defense) executive. She told the group of which I was a part some spine-chilling tales, for example:
- The US Air Force fought for years against the use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles); they want human pilots. If they don’t have live pilots, they have fewer people overall, less appeal in recruiting, and ultimately fewer resources. Of course, they wouldn’t have pilot casualties, but that seems to be an unimportant ingredient in the overall equation.
- Many years ago, the DoD said it wanted no more C-17s. But they continued to get them anyway — year after year, rammed through by Congress and the powerful Boeing lobbyists.
The Air Force wants human pilots, so they can put them in harm’s way? Congress spends billions of dollars on items that are specifically not needed or wanted?
The relevance of this is not simply to rant; it’s to point out that dirty politics will be very, very likely to play an ongoing role in the adoption of new forms of energy. After all, if our leaders will do patently dishonest things for billions of dollars, what do you think they’ll do for trillions?
On Corruption
| March 9, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
I’m back on the East Coast for a few days. When I come here I normally stay with my parents (they’re in their mid-late 80s) at their home in Philadelphia — which happens to be an apartment in a very nice retirement community. As it often does, the conversation this evening turned to politics. But unlike many political discussions between parents and their children, it was not at all rancorous. Through our talks, we try to understand why the US as a nation is having so much difficulty in gaining traction in solving its most obvious problems: wars, healthcare, financial reform — and, of course, creating a level playing field for renewable energy.
I pointed out that each of these is rooted in what I label generally as corruption, which I define as the supremacy of money and power over common sense and decency in creating and enforcing our laws. I acknowledged that corruption is a harsh word, and that it applies more accurately in some cases than in others. But I do think that if our leaders were kind and sensible people, uninfluenced by the power of money, we would have immediate workable answers for these and many other pressing issues.
Since we’ve so often discussed this idea of corruption as it applies to energy policy, and since healthcare is so omnipresent in a retirement community, let me use this latter as an example. The 94-year-old lady living across the beautifully carpeted hallway from my parents’ place recently had a knee replacement, which was, of course, 100% paid for by Medicare. We encountered her in the hallway; she still struggles to walk — which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering her age — and so they’re in the process of scheduling a second such operation.
Meanwhile, our nation has millions of people 60 years younger who happen to be uninsured and face untended illness or financial ruination — or both — because they can’t get health insurance.
While my heart goes out to the old lady, I point out a simple, if ugly truth: the only reason she’s receiving serial knee replacements is that they are profitable. She’s thin as a toothpick, horribly frail, and quite obviously has no prognosis under which she’ll ever be able to walk more than a few slow steps without terrible pain — regardless of how many times her knee is replaced. Yet I caution you not to expect a change in healthcare legislation that might damage the profit stream generated by those surgeries she’ll be receiving — even if making such a change would free up huge amounts of cash that would more than pay the cost of insuring those who presently can’t find coverage. The power of that money is so intense that such change simply will not happen — regardless of how compelling the argument — or how enormous the benefit to the public.
Do you have a better word to describe such a system than corrupt? Can you introduce me to one honest, reasonably intelligent person who thinks that spending a fortune on knee replacements for 94-year-olds is a good, fair-minded idea while others who happen not to be able to get health insurance face catastrophic health conditions to which their pitiable complaints will be turned a deaf ear?
I know that the vast majority of the many millions of people working in healthcare are honest, decent, and incredibly talented. I know dozens of them personally, and I respect them deeply. But the fact remains that the medical industry is in place to make money. And if you happen to be one of the lucky ones (like our friend above) who benefits from that profit motive, I urge you to consider it a bonus for which you should be profoundly thankful — because not everyone is so lucky.
So as not to ignore the energy industry entirely in this post, it’s clear that a similar argument could be made here. As I’ve pointed out, the oil industry alone employs seven lobbyists for each of the 535 members of Congress. Do you think Big Oil would be spending those hundreds of millions of dollars if they weren’t buying something of far greater value in exchange ? Sorry to appear cynical, but I’m convinced that the level playing field we’ve discussed here so frequently will come about when and only when we’ve found a way to disconnect our lawmakers from the powerful interests that buy their votes.
Corporate lobbying is an institution that is causing more harm to more innocent people with each passing month. What’s the matter with simply abolishing it? The framers of the Constitution wisely built in the right of the people to redress their government, but I think it’s pretty clear that they didn’t intend this patent dishonesty that’s ripping our civilization and its people slowly and painfully apart. What’s the harm in simply saying that money should not buy legislative influence?
More on the Global Warming "Debate"
| December 3, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
A couple other thoughts on the global warming (GW) “debate.” In the interview that I conducted with eminent physicist Bruce Allen for my book on renewables, he pointed out that there are numerous climatologists who do not support the anthropogenic GW theory but who have not published their ideas for fear of ridicule or reprisal. He claims that once this is taken into account, there is a healthy number (though still a minority, he admits) of skeptics in the ranks of serious scientists.
For the record, Bruce isn’t claiming that GW doesn’t exist; his real beef is that scientists who don’t toe the line on this subject are being suppressed, i.e., that politics is superceding science. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, and if it’s true, of course I agree that this is unacceptable. Again, we seem to see simple corruption at work. Just like the oil companies have bought favoritism for fossil fuels, anyone can see that there is the potential for corruption here. No GW problem = no money to fix it.
Having said all this, my response is unchanged from my earlier post on the subject:
The only real issue is the level of certainty with which accept the theory. Are we “100% sure” or “sure beyond a reasonable doubt” that human activity is causing GW? Perhaps not. But do we really need to be? If the majority of the oncologists examining me told me that I had early stage cancer and a prompt operation would save my life—even if a minority weren’t sure—I’d have the operation every day of the week.
Hot Discussion at 2GreenEnergy.com
| November 8, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
I’d like to call readers’ attention to a really important discussion occuring in the comments under the post re: the Business of Plugging. I encourage even more opinions on the subject here; please feel free to join in.
Cleaning Up Government – An Easy Task?
| October 12, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
As I have often written, cleaning up government is integral to success in the migration to renewables. Big Energy routinely spends millions of dollars influencing legislation that will protect itself from the incursion of new technologies that will disrupt their profit stream. And in an effort to comprehend the enormity of the task in front of all us in government reform, I ask you to watch a video: a session of the House Government Reform Committee.
At first clance, this may appear a bit off topic. Why concern ourselves with the corruption from Big Pharma? Well, to me, it’s just another way of coming face to face with corporatocracy and the corruption it brings: how powerful and evil it is, and ultimately, how difficult it will be to eradicate.
Here we have the pharmaceutical industry paying off one or more representatives to insert favorable, protective language in a bill that has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals at all and — best of all — must be passed on an emergency basis and therefore cannot be reread in its final form before the vote that will pass it into law. Here is all the protection Big Pharma will need from their malfeasance in profiting from faulty, dangerous vaccinations, inserted at the last minute, in the middle of the night, immediately before congress approves the Homeland Security Act. Now millions of families with brain damaged kids will be denied the recourse to which they would have been entitled, because of the brazen criminality of the pharmaceutical industry.
I think the most common reaction to the video is anger. But when you’ve calmed down, ask yourself: what’s the magnitude of the task in front of us in cleaning this up? What will it take to rid ourselves of a system that has become so rotten, so brutally indifferent to the rules of fair play and decency, so cold in the face of the human suffering it leaves in its wake? Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
