Category: Environment

Posted on

The Mythical Open Road

As you sit in your car in the middle of yet another traffic jam in almost any major city and stare at your white knuckles, think about those beautiful car advertisements.

Obviously, Ford and Toyota and General Motors are never going to show you where you will really spend all your time in their glorious automobiles. But just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a round of good old fashioned outrage.

The ads show the beautiful cars– almost always perfectly, minty clean– cruising all by their lonesome selves down endless stretches of awe-inspiring roads that channel through hills and valleys, mountains and rivers, prairies and open plains. What is most astonishing about these scenarios is that there are never any other cars on the road. Nobody. Nowhere. No trucks. No cars. No ugly, fat, disgusting, gas-guzzling Winnebago’s. Nada. What a wonderful driving experience. You bet.

It’s like when they show anorexic models eating diet yogurt. Right. You’ll look like that someday. Some day if you manage to kidnap Kate Moss and transplant your brain into her body.

Nobody is surprised if car companies want to show their products in the best light. We probably generally laugh to ourselves and continue to wait for the normally scheduled program to resume. But why should we put up with this crap? Why are we so damn passive? Why can’t we muster a little righteous indignation for the outright fraud perpetuated on the consumer by these ads?

Let’s not mince words: these ads are indeed a fraud. They are filled with lies and distortion. You will never ever get to take the drive that is being offered to you. It doesn’t exist anywhere in the civilized world anymore. Why not? Because every idiot on the planet wants that driving experience so they are all stacked up behind each other on the freeways grinding their teeth and wondering why everyone else doesn’t just get off the road.

Posted on

The Irvings Sink a Ship

There is a myth out there that a lot of your tax money goes to welfare cheats. True. Here’s one of them:

About 30 years ago, the Irving Corporation (a big Maritime oil company owned by the Irving family) accidentally sunk a barge loaded with PCBs in the St. Laurence River. When government scientists discovered that it was leaking deadly PCBs, the Irvings said, “surely you don’t expect us to pay for it?”.

The government raised the vessel for $45 million, cleaned up the PCB’s, then gave it back to the Irvings for a pittance, $5 million.

Why has no one been arrested? Why aren’t the Irvings sitting in jail? Why haven’t the RCMP seized the Irvings’ assets in order to sell them to pay the bill?

Because the Irvings are not like you or me, my friend. They are rich. They know politicians on a first-name basis.

Now that’s the way to do business! Thank you Mr. Chretien, now we’ll just resume our profiteering, if you don’t mind…

Posted on

Demonstrations

Some editorialists– including the Globe and Mail– are complaining that these demonstrators at these big trade conferences are a) wrong and b) undemocratic. Naomi Klein went on the CBC to set the record straight. Unfortunately, she stunk. So I’ll have to do it.

There is some legitimacy to the point of view that demonstrators try to short-cut democracy. We have elections here. The people voted for Al Gore and Jean Chretien in the U.S. and Canada, respectively, and they got their wishes: George Bush Jr. and Jean Chretien. So what right do these demonstrators have to try to change the law by short-circuiting the democratic process and trying to get their way by bullying and shouting?

Naomi argued that, well, what these big corporations are planning is so awful, well, somebody just has to do something. Of course, that begs the question of who gets to decide when something is so awful that undemocratic means must be used to change the law. Like abortion.

What she should have pointed out is that while “nobody elected the demonstrators” nor did they elect the lobbyists for those multi-national corporations. And under the Bush administration, those lobbyists often actually write the law, and they certainly play a powerful role– behind closed doors– in influencing legislators on how to write the law.

One example. When Tom Delay ran for election to the U.S. Congress, he did not campaign thusly: if you vote for me, I will hold expensive breakfast meetings with highly paid lobbyists for the biggest corporations on the planet so they can tell me what they would like to see in the next round of legislation governing mergers and environmental regulations and minimum wages and so on, while you, you working taxpayer dependent on your wages, why, you’d be lucky to smell a fart from my executive assistant. No sir. Mr. Delay tells everyone that he will represent their interests and do what’s right, regardless of “the special interests” and lobbyists. He campaigns on his sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of the majority of his voters. Then he turns around and spends all of his time– and I mean, all of his time– with corporate hacks, and meaningless totemic symbols like the boy-scouts and baseball players.

Does anyone seriously believe that corporations donate millions of dollars to election campaigns for nothing? Because they are civic minded??? Because they really think that what is good for America is good for IBM?

Those lobbyists see to it that Mr. Delay receives big fat contributions come election time, so he can run big fat television ads that show what a sensitive, caring, unimpeachable character he is, and get re-elected, so he can continue to serve his corporate masters.

As long as the election laws in the U.S. continue to permit this entrenched system of corruption and distortion, demonstrators can certainly make a case for the fact that they are trying to restore a balance to this democracy. Since they can’t get in those $300-a-plate fundraisers and since they can’t offer Mr. Delay a weekend at an exclusive private Hawaiian resort, and since they can’t send a couple of lawyers over to actually help Mr. Delay write the legislation– they have no choice but to take their issues to the streets.

Why don’t the leaders get smart: they should have initiated talks with Greenpeace and other issue-oriented groups– who do legitimately represent various interests– and brought them to the table. They should have invited them in. And they should have listened seriously to their concerns.

Ha ha ha! Had you going, didn’t I? You thought for one minute that I seriously believed that George Bush Jr. might want to meet with people who care about the environment!

Ha ha ha!

April Fools!

Posted on

Violent Extremist Tree-Huggers

Only the shameless hooligans behind George Bush Jr. could have the effrontery to try to paint Bill Clinton, the moderately right-leaning president who killed welfare, as an environmental “extremist”.

In the past thirty years, the average wage of the top executives in the United States has risen by several hundred percent. At the same time, the average wage of people who actually work for a living, has stagnated. Only those same shameless hooligans would foist upon us the idea that those over-paid fat-cat executives need more money, and the average working stiff needs less roads, less education, less health-care, and a poorer quality of life.

What a tax cut does, of course, is remove government services that benefit everyone and reward people who have the least need of financial assistance.

But that’s not really what Bush is up to. Do you think Exxon and Bristol-Myers and Dupont would be content with being taxed less? By God, you have no idea. The real goal of this Republican administration is not only to reduce the tax liabilities of the rich, but to get them government subsidies, in the form of additional tax breaks, reduction of liabilities, and tort law reform. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And Mr. Bush is going to be in a big hurry to get this agenda through because conventional wisdom is that the Democrats will retake Congress in the 2002 elections.

One example: there used to be a rule that the government would not contract with companies that were in violation of environmental laws, or work-place health and safety regulations. Well, no more! Why on earth should the government hold these private corporations to such onerous and expensive obligations such as not dumping toxic wastes into your drinking water or cutting back on safety equipment, at the expense of a few mutilations, just so they can get some of that government largesse?

The Republicans seem to believe that allowing corporations to not spend money on cleaning up the toxic wastes that helped them make enormous profits– which means that you and I, brothers and sisters, get to pay for it– is what is known as “tax fairness”. Anyone who thinks otherwise is, of course, an “extremist”.

Posted on

Self-Regulation and Snitch Lines

I just heard that Mike Harris is going to get rid of all those snitch-lines and allow people on welfare to determine for themselves just how much they need and how long they need it for.

You think he’s crazy? You think that people would actually lie about how much money they need from the province to take care of their children and put food on the table, and to pay for those rapidly escalating rents on those de-controlled apartments? Do you really think someone might just quit his job out of sheer, perverse laziness, and collect welfare instead? How can you think that about people?

Just kidding, of course. Everyone knows that most people are fundamentally dishonest and, given half a chance, will cheat, lie, and steal at every opportunity.

Except…

Well, you see, Mikey Harris wants to do precisely the above…. except, he doesn’t want to rely on the honesty and integrity of the poor. He wants to rely on the honesty and integrity of the rich, the owners and managers of big industrial concerns that might– just might– cut corners by dumping toxic wastes into the environment or polluting the air.

I’m not making this up. He wants to rely more on “self-regulation” and get rid of those unpleasant, annoying pollution inspectors and officials.

Was there ever a more toxic illustration of the real philosophy of the conservatives: two sets of laws and principles– one for the rich, and one for the poor.

Posted on

Cities

Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads.

Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?

Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.

Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.

No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.

So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!

Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage. [added July 2004] The pneumatic tubes didn’t work perfectly, but neither did the trucks. The question is, if you invested 40 more years of development and refinements into the pneumatic tube system, what would you have?

You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.

What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.

Posted on

Cities

Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads. Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?

Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.

Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.

No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.

So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!

Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage.

You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.

What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.

A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.

Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.

Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.

Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.

Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.

In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.

The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.

But nobody could do anything about urbanization. It was easier to blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you could elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.

Posted on

Exxon Sues Itself

I’ll bet I know something about the 1994 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince Edward Sound that you don’t know.

The Exxon Valdez was the worst oil tanker spill of all time, polluting more than 1000 miles of Alaskan coastline and endangering a vital, delicate ecosystem. Lawsuits followed of course. BIG lawsuits.

The plaintiffs in the case against Exxon were awarded $5 billion, which is about as much as Exxon earns in profit each year. That’s a pretty fair fine, I think. What’s the use of a five or ten million dollar penalty when a corporation sees an amount like that as a mere operating expense? Do you think $5 billion is a deterrent? I think it is.

A group called the Seattle Seafood Processors banded together to sue Exxon for compensation for lost income and all that jazz. Exxon settled with this group out of court. The settlement was SECRET. They get to settle out of court, and we get to wonder if they got anything, and Exxon gets to hide the cost of the settlement from their stockholders, the media, the public, and the other plaintiffs. Maybe there was something about their case that was peculiarly alarming to Exxon. Whatever.

Anyway, people did find out eventually that the agreed upon amount was $70 million. Good deal, right? I mean, these guys get to take a vacation and everything – they can’t fish anymore—and get paid for it! How much do you want to bet that they just laid off all their workers and kept the money for themselves? Well, hell, why not? This is America.

But here the story gets interesting. If somebody does some damage to you and you sue them and then you settle out of court, your case is done, right? You are out of the picture. You sign an agreement saying that Exxon has compensated you for your losses and you have no further claim.

That’s what you think. What happened is this: the Seattle Seven continued their lawsuit, with the full knowledge and consent of Exxon. The very lawsuit they had settled! And they won! Big time! $700 million! Hurray for the lawyers, who get to collect about $100 million of that for themselves. Hurray for America! Hurray for everyone!

Wait a minute. It seems that Exxon is now taking the Seattle Seven to court. What! How can this be? What a strange reversal! Did the Seattle Seven dump a bunch of dead fish on Exxon’s front lawn or something? No! It seems that Exxon had a secret deal with the Seattle Seven that stated that, in exchange for the $70 million, the Seattle Seven would continue their legal action and, if they won, Exxon would collect all of their winnings.

I am not making this up.

Whoa Nelly! What a concept! Exxon was betting that the Seattle Seven’s lawyers were really, really good, and would win a much larger settlement in court than $70 million. The Seattle Seven were pretty stupid, don’t you think? Why didn’t they hire worse lawyers (if such a thing is imaginable)? Then they wouldn’t have been out $630 million.

But wait! Hold on to your hats! The Seattle Seven don’t want to give the $700 million to Exxon anymore. They want to keep it all for themselves! Well, for themselves and their lawyers. Exxon is quite upset about this turn of events. That’s why Exxon’s lawyers are taking the Seattle Seven to court. Give us back your money!

Do you have this all straight? Yes, you’re right: Exxon sued themselves. Can you picture their lawyers in their solemn robes, celebrating after the verdict? Woohoo! We got $700 million! We’re rich! Now we can pay off our lawyers!

Strange story, isn’t it? Why did Exxon make this preposterous deal? Nobody knows for sure. The only people who benefit, of course, are the lawyers. The lawyers who negotiated the deal for the Seattle Seven probably got most of the $70 million. The lawyers who won the lawsuit probably got about $200 million—I am NOT kidding. Contingency fees typically end up in the 25-40% range. Exxon’s lawyers got money too. How much? Well, if the tobacco industry settlement is any guide, they probably persuaded Exxon to sign an agreement paying them a percentage of the difference between the maximum amount of liability given a worst case judgment, and the deal that was actually struck. It sounds like they didn’t do very well. I’ll bet they thought the maximum liability would be somewhere in the $500 – $750 million range. I’m just guessing now. I’ll bet they expected to earn $100 million by keeping the liability below $1 billion.

I’ll bet they didn’t offer to give Exxon a refund of their fees because they did so poorly. That’s not the way life works for the rich, my friend. If you are a baseball player and you hit 30 homeruns, you will get a new contract worth $10 million. If you then hit 5 home runs, do you give the money back? Are you kidding? Do stock brokers convicted of swindling people out of millions of dollars suddenly walk or take public transit?

But if you are supposed to load a truck in two hours and you do it in eight instead, do you think you’ll get paid?

The only advantage to Exxon—had the settlement agreement with the Seattle Seven stayed secret– is that it looks like they are paying a lot more damages than they really are. The $700 million is part of a shared settlement with fishermen and hunters and others who were harmed by the Exxon Valdez disaster. The total of the settlement is $5 billion. It’s hard to believe that Exxon could be so stupid as to figure on coming out ahead of this deal. On the other hand, this is a corporation that hired an alcoholic captain to steer a vessel loaded with oil through one of the most hazardous and sensitive coastal ecosystems in North America.

Maybe the $700 million is tax deductible. Actually, since it is subtracted from their earnings, it quite probably is tax deductible. Who does pay the taxes on the $700 million? The Seattle Seven? For money they will never receive? Exxon? For a judgment they are paying themselves?

Exxon, incidentally, has not yet paid a penny of the $5 billion, though the judgment was awarded five years ago. Exxon is sitting on $5 billion that it owes other people. If you were sitting on $50 that you owed Exxon, you would be in jail in very short order, my friend.

A judge, meanwhile, has annulled the secret agreement between Exxon and the Seattle Seven and ordered Exxon to pay out the $700 million. Exxon is appealing. Well, why not? They have lawyers.

Well, let’s say you are as outraged as I am about this deal.

What are you going to do? Get a lawyer?

Posted on

The Clampetts are Here

Oil Man

Who owns oil? Oil comes from living material in marshlands and swamps that has been squeezed deep into the earth for millions of years. Some of this material becomes coal. Some of it becomes oil.

So who owns it? The oil companies find this oil, buy some land on top of it, and then suck it dry, like giant mechanical vampires. But oil does not exist in a straight vertical column. It is spread out way down there. It spreads under land that does not belong to oil companies. But our governments have agreed to allow oil companies to suck the oil out from wherever they want, as long as they have the “rights” to a surface area nearby. It is sort of “finders keepers”.

Capitalists think this is great. They think that since the oil company had the initiative and risk-taking bravado to go out there and find the oil, that they should have the right to sell it. What they are really selling is millions of years of organic and geological processes. All of these took place before we walked upon this earth. They belong to everyone, including future generations, and they should be treated more that way. The next time the oil companies holler about “deregulation”, think about that.

In the poor half of the world, corrupt politicians and generals sell their nations’ lifeblood to the West for a mere pittance. We consume most of it and fill the earth with our pollution. We are destroying the ozone. Oil tankers run aground destroying wild-life habitats. Our cities are so infested with automobiles that rush hour now extends from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm.

The Americans are also thinking a lot about water lately. They will need a lot of it in the coming century. There are thousands of golf-courses in California alone. Where is it going to come from? Hey, there’s a bunch of big lakes up here! Let’s just stick a nozzle in one end and pipe it all down to Arizona! You Canadians don’t need to worry: we’ll only take the water that’s on our side.

Posted on

Ontario Hydro Tarts

Ontario Hydro Tarts Up

I don’t know about you, but I have to work for my wages. I actually have to show up at an office and do something useful. It is very clear to me that if I don’t produce anything of value to my employer, I will be fired.

On the other hand, there is Paul Rhodes. Paul Rhodes is a consultant to Ontario Hydro. Ontario Hydro was worried that people might think that just because hydro costs have increased every year since time immemorial, and just because our nuclear power plants break down occasionally, people might think that Ontario Hydro doesn’t care about the environment.

Well, what’s the solution? Ontario Hydro could actually care about the environment. Ontario Hydro could develop some internal policies about preventing damage to the environment. They could allocate a few million dollars to a department responsible for ensuring compliance with environmental protection laws. They could even work on new ways of running cables that would be less disruptive to the migratory habits of the creatures the live in the forests of Ontario.

But, hey, consultants don’t get big bucks for stating the obvious!

Or, they could just spend a few million dollars on an advertising campaign.

“If Ontario Hydro is to successfully present a more proactive positioning on environmental protection it should be prepared to commit adequate resources to a paid media/advertising campaign.” Wow! That’s what Paul Rhodes recommended. Gee. How did Ontario Hydro manage find a great thinker like Paul Rhodes? Well, it turns out that Paul Rhodes is a friend of Ontario Premier Mike Harris.

Paul Rhodes was paid $255,000 for a 10-page report. The report recommended that Ontario Hydro spend more money on advertising to convince the public that they care about the environment.

I wish I had a job like that. I wish Mike Harris would be my friend. Mike Harris wants to cut taxes and save the Ontario taxpayer lots of money. Here I am, Mike: I would have been quite willing to work for a mere $100,000, to create a report of the same breath-taking simplicity, elegance, and intelligence. Here it is: spend more money on advertising. Done. You can pay me now. Not only did I give you good advice, but I saved you the trouble of reading through the entire 10 pages of Paul Rhodes’ report.