On Corruption – Continued
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?
I am not a “tree hugger”, but I am certainly not unconditionally on the side of the powerful multinational oil companies. All sides should have an equal opportunity to compete freely without interference from the other side.
Starting with the Saturn EV-1 electric car developed by General Motors, the oil companies worked behind the scenes to influence General Motors management to scrap the project, and influenced the California Air Resources Board to lower their standards making electric cars unnecessary.
When the inventor sold the rights to his metal nickel hydrate battery to GM, they gave it to one of their subsidiaries, Cobasys “for further development”. Within weeks, Chevron got the
the patents to the battery through Cobasys and immediately sued Toyota for using the technology and won a $20 million dollar judgement against Toyota requiring them to recall all of their RAV4-EVs. Of the 400 RAV4-EVS leased by Toyota, 180 of them had contracts to buy. The others were recalled and scrapped by Toyota just like the EV-1s.
Those 180 highly coveted RAV4-EVs are still on the road. We were told that “there was really no market for them.”
I have no problem with the oil companies drilling for oil anywhere they want to, they provide an important role in the energy industry. Just don’t undermine competing technologies!
Let us hope that GM will stick with its plans to market the Chevy Volt after Bob Lutz retires in May and not be influenced by oil lobbyists!!
There are some interesting interviews available here: http://janhelfeld.com/ Where a guy with a funny looking tie tries to use the Socratic method to interview public figures. Trying to nail down their basis for decisions is like trying to herd cats.
The first assumption we have to dispose of is that our politicians are intelligent or motivated to work for the best interests of our country. They are not. The second assumption to eliminate is that people in general actually do things according to some plan. They don’t. People do stuff. They come up with reasons for doing stuff. In that order.
It comes down to this: if you want to do something about the oil companies, the government corruption, or the health care; look to your own family and neighbors and convince them to stop working for money and to create communities that are self-sufficient. The rich get richer and more powerful because we give them our money for crap we don’t need and we work for them to get the money to buy their crap, usually making the banks and government more powerful in the process of handling and printing that money.
Stay home. Buy less. Buy local. Make it yourself and stop ‘hoping’ that this giant unsustainable mess of systems on top of unsustainable resource consumption will somehow magically defy the laws of physics and right itself after it has already capsized.
Our economy is upside down. The idea of big systems is passe. It’s time to deconstruct the infrastructure and rebuild one that works locally. We Don’t Need Them.
Here’s a link to a cogent and impassioned commentary by Keith Olbermann on the day that legal fictions in our country were bestowed with the standing of natural persons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZKETizybw
Here are the observations of Thom Hartmann on that same grave and shameful renunciation of the essence of our founding principles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyOE-yaewG8&feature=related
I said myself at the time that this fateful event would prove to be the death of our long ailing democratic republic. That assessment continues to solidify.
Much as Keith Olbermann observed, with the approaching death rattle of books and print media, and the already half-accomplished destruction of net neutrality, we’re looking at the corporate government version of George Orwell’s nightmare – the continual revision of all available history and information. We’ll soon be arriving at a condition where inconvenient truths will be far more instantly shunted down an increasingly inaccessible rabbit hole, while convenient and useful lies will be ever more shamelessly and seamlessly paraded and trumpeted.
Whenever a new authoritarian regime kills a democracy, it always uses and/or manufactures great crises to facilitate and mask its seizure of power. In a state of fear, confusion, desperation and delusion, a population falls so much more easily into the grip of such domination.
Currently (and predictably), key elements of the media debate are being framed, conducted and concluded in such a way as to turn up the boil in the public bloodstream in an atmosphere devoid of the necessary background to correctly target the ensuing steam and pressure.
You may have noticed the recently mounting corporate media coverage of the “fraudclosure” practices of the banking sector, and the $45 trillion dollar sinkhole that may soon yawn beneath our national foundations.
In my estimation, this long-overdue swell in ‘public interest’ reporting on this issue is the direct result of recent polls indicating that, deluded by the corporate media echo chamber, the majority of Americans now wrongly lay the blame for the banking crisis at the feet of Obama and the current Democrat Congress. This astonishing fiction that our pinstriped jackboots have so carefully nurtured within the public mind can now be used in the upcoming election to direct exasperated popular sentiment against the remaining fragments of genuine opposition.
It’s therefore now clearly to the advantage of those entities controlling the corporate media to shed a very bright and carefully angled light on this colossal cockroach of a scandal, and thereby poison the popular perception of the party that’s now in power, and thus push our country back once more onto a more fascist heading.
Lest anyone think ‘fascist’ too strong a term, let me present an inclusive dictionary definition of fascism: A form of government characterized by the merging of business leadership and the state, rigid one-party rule by the extreme right-wing emphasizing strong centralized power, with militarism, an aggressive nationalism, and the suppression of all opposition.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think for a moment that the GOP is at all alone in this confederacy for corporate government. Both parties have abandoned their traditional values: The GOP – fiscal responsibility, decentralized authority, and defense of the Constitution; The Democrats – civil liberties, the will of the people, and the greater good of the population. I’m quite well aware that the Dems are pocketed almost as thoroughly as the Repubs; they’re simply a little less proud of that fact than the Repubs are, and the Dems are far more firmly obliged by their constituency to make a show of defending Main Street (at least by the meager force of rhetoric).
I’m reminded of an ancient observation – that of the 1st Century Greek historian and essayist Plutarch, “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
Our great nation began as a cluster of invasive European colonies along the coast of a remote continent. With the support of only a third of our people – and decisive assistance from the French crown – we established a birthright then unknown in human history. Unique among nations, we claimed a liberty that was torn from the claws of an avaricious king by the blood and treasure of hallowed patriots, and handed down to us enlarged and developed by wise stewardship, popular struggle and progressive reforms. We are now meanly losing that precious liberty to faceless inhuman greed machines draped in a thin skin of legality.
Our government was founded upon human liberty and upon human rights to possess property, and yet five imprudent individuals – with a majority of one – on our nation’s highest court have now judged that property to be equal with humanity, and have brashly surrendered our human rights and liberty to be possessed by that property.
In short, we shall now be owned, and devoured, by our things.