Welcome Back, Me
I clearly have been watching more picture albums arrive on the blog page than my own writings recently. I haven’t had a lot of chance for independent thought recently, and what I do generate normally comes on my walk to work and is either promptly forgotten or not particularly significant in a lasting way.
I did have quite a bit of trouble reading this article with my eyes rolled all the way up into my forehead. It took them halfway down the page, from a grocery store spokeswoman for goodness’ sake, to utter the word “commodity.”
Obama can’t figure out whose ass he needs to kick, and on the way to the World Cup Biden reminds us how pissed his boss is. Power to Biden going to the World Cup. Better than just sitting around next to your bucket… trying to look mad. Go where you can help some Americans out and put a good face on for the world. Güle güle.
Much like the global economy, for which the post-FDR US Presidency now seems to imply Senior Mouseketeer-level leadership, a negative environmental event is just kind of a passive horror that only permits symbolic reaction.
But, unlike the economy’s occasional boons from Lady Luck (Clinton’s magic carpet ride across the dot-com bubble comes to mind), you really can’t do a lot to take credit for environmental upsides. Hard to turn out a press release for flushing the toilet one less time this week (and we’re at Peak Water, they say).
So anger now reigns supreme. But much like Yosemite Sam doggone’ing it in the wake of Bugs Bunny, anger is an expression of helplessness rather than strength.
We all need to be angry, apparently. We need to read New York Times articles to find out exactly how to kick BP in the nuts without compromising other key social grievances and sparing the fate of the Quik-E-Mart jobber.
We can vote, we can accept our 8% dividend yields from the stocks of actually well-maintained multinational oil companies, we can buy property with a reasonable assumption that it won’t be expropriated, and we can buy the Monster Cables if we think the bits stay a bit sharper on the way through. What we can’t do is address problems as they come our way. We can’t accept downside risk.
The same conspiracy types who could probably tell you a lengthy fable about Goldman and their ties to the government are often the ones calling for their criminal prosecution and seizure of assets. People normally think of Big Brother as surveillance, but misuse of the criminal justice system and property rights are by far more disturbing to me.
What bugs me is the new solution mechanism for problems. We look to our President, whom the forefathers really didn’t intend to empower that much, to kick the dirt and call meetings. If not, he doesn’t care, and my would that be hurtful.
Then, we want to throw everybody in jail. Because that’s just what freedom loving people do.
Then, let’s have the government take over all those nasty oil wells and hire the same contractors to run them and blow them up at a rate defined by the calculated risk allowed by regulation/ethics and the market’s tolerance for astronomical cost bases associated with extracting these valuable commodities safely.
We own the benefits, blame the negative externalities on the source, and look to the cops to save the day or at least yell at people until it works itself out. What a pathetic way to go about things.
I briefly feel like a tree-hugger here, but if anything binds us all together on this crazy world of ours, it’s the world itself. We own it together, we delegate power to decide and enforce who owns each chunk to (hopefully) well-run entities, and we share the positive and negative outcomes with each other.
The gatekeepers do not bind us like the earth and air. But we see our gatekeepers (be it Chavez or the White House) as the landlords. And guess whose problem it is when the apartment fridge leaks coolant? We’re not in a totalitarian government, or a communist government, or a fascist government, or a theocracy, or an anarchy, or an oligarchy, or a democracy for that matter.
We’re sharecropping. This isn’t right, because we own the land together.
We need to stop this. We’re better than all of this.