Needlenose

Judicial activism in liberal courts result in equal rights for Americans.  Reactionary judicial activism consists of increasing the rights of corporations over Americans, such as keeping individual campaign contributions in check while allowing unlimited corporate donations.  Or continuously letting Big Coal destroy mountains and fresh water streams and to hell with the locals.

*Update 8/6/10* Great analysis of 2 recent rulings in favor of gay marriage along with encouraging prognostication of how SCOTUS might rule.

For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use  ’true (or full) cost accounting’  to adequately compute the total cost of fuels.  Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel.  The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.

So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax.  In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.

The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered  Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!

For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type.  How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody?  Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?

We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy.  We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.

But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.

*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells?  Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?

Finally!!  A US President calls for an end to the ludicrous tax breaks that keep fossil fuel prices artificially low!  But you have to really push this, Mr. President, you have a golden window of opportunity here.  If you wimp-out now, it will be years if not decades before another President can address this.

After voicing his support for the recent wing-nut terrorist Joe Stack and his suicide air attack on the IRS, Steve King is now standing up for the little guy – the Washington lobbyists on K Street.  They are apparently his ‘go to’ guys for all his information regarding pending legislation!  Imagine that, getting all your campaign financing, legislative review and background information from one convenient source!

Has Mr. King taken over the Pombo mantle of Congressional venality?  How does an evil dumbfuck like that get elected anyway – they can’t be that stupid in Iowa, can they?

For the short term, I think Pelosi should strip Mr. King of his congressional staffers and aides, since he his needs can all be satisfied by K Street.

*Update 2/26/10* Please show your appreciation for Mr. King by donating to one of his two Democratic challengers in the Iowa 5th District, Matthew Campbell or Mike Denklau.  I prefer Mike, but I think Matt might have the edge in $ and seems more Iowan.  They said we couldn’t unseat Pombo here in CA, but McNearney is in Congress and Pombo is off shagging sheep, so it can be done!

*Update 2 2/26/10* Seems to be the day for asshole Republican Congressmen. Trent Franks believes African Americans were better off as slaves then they are today – some tortured argument involving abortion.  Let’s fund whomever runs against him!

There seems to be only one means to achieve bi-partisan support for a bill – lard it with pork.  Or make it a pork-only bill, with cash for everybody’s constituents!

Case in point – 5 members of the GOP, hearing the “Woo pig sooie!” siren call of pork-barrell spending, crossed the aisle to vote for the so-called Jobs Bill.

The Repugs used this to good effect in the early post-9/11 days of the Shrubya Preznitcy to bring Democrat pigs to vote on their bills – Remember those bipartisan bamboozles such as the Agribusiness Handout  of 2008, the original Agribusiness Handout of 2003, and perhaps the most odious piece of legislation ever, the Big Energy Handout of 2003?

That must be why the Health Care Bill stalled out…insufficient pork!

Carbon limits are for the little people! Faster, driver!

Sir Richard Branson saw fit to lecture to world leaders currently debating carbon emissions limits at Copenhagen on behalf of the airline industry.  “Reduction targets”, not carbon taxes is what he’d like.  He’s also pushing the idea of moving the airline fleets to biofuels, something he terms green fuel.

Biofuels, you know – things like ethanol and bio diesel derived from industrial agriculture that require more energy inputs then they produce in outputs and exist only as pork delivery vehicles for firms like ConAgra?

Keep in mind this bullshit is from a guy who has made an a second fortune from running an especially carbon porky business, an airline.  And if that weren’t enough, his latest venture is to fly fat rich tourists into space.  Hey Sir Carbon Asshole, here’s a reduction for you – shelve your stupid space tourism and save the planet an additional 54,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually – and tell your rich buddies to go plant some trees on one of their 365 days of yearly vacation instead.

And while you’re at it, why don’t you make a real statement and shelve your new Formula 1 racing team.  I don’t think the additional 50 tonnes of CO2 your car will emit per season will ‘tip the balance’ but talk about hypocrisy.

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

Depressing news, a new world record – there are now 1 billion hungry people in the world, about 1 out of every 7 people.  Lester Brown of the WorldWatch Institute warns how food shortages are leading to failed states and a threat to the overall world order.

Venal senators from the Midwest just don’t get it – they insist on porking out the current energy bill with subsidies for corn farmers, diverting food from the plates of the world poor into the gas tanks of the rich’s SUVs.

Josh Marshall caught this snippet in a Politico article on the meeting between President Obama and the CEOs of major banks last Friday:

“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. . . .

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

It’s a nice quip, demonstrating the commonsense grasp on things that appeals to many of us who voted for Obama. But many of us are also concerned that such clear thinking has gotten lost in translation between the president and his top financial appointees’ plans to deal with the current meltdown. A joint profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner published last night by ProPublica and the Washington Post gives a vivid example:

In September 2005, Timothy Geithner made one of his most visible moves as a supervisor of the U.S. banking system. He summoned the nation’s top financial firms and their regulators to streamline an antiquated system that threatened Wall Street’s boom.

. . . Geithner’s summit, held at the New York Fed’s fortress-like headquarters near Wall Street, was a success. By fall 2006, the new system had all but eliminated the logjam, helping derivatives trade more efficiently.

. . . Although Geithner repeatedly raised concerns about the failure of banks to understand their risks, including those taken through derivatives, he and the Federal Reserve system did not act with enough force to blunt the troubles that ensued. . . .

. . . Looking back at his time at the New York Fed, Geithner said: “I wish I had worked to change the framework, rather than to work within that framework.”

That same sense of caution seems to have afflicted Obama and his economic team to date, as they resist calls for bolder action and treat the banksters who created the current mess as delicate, yet powerful interests who mustn’t be spooked — to the extent that Obama compared them to suicide bombers a couple of weeks ago.

This isn’t the first administration to feel intimidated, and its ambitions constrained, by the perceived power of Wall Street’s reaction (anyone remember James Carville’s famous quote about wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market?).

But in a moment of such importance, I can’t help but ask: Mr. President, why are you standing on that side of the pitchforks?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

It dents my American pride to admit that a corrupt crony capitalist state like the PRC shows superior leadership and vision on the green retooling of their automotive industry.  Talk about a lost opportunity!  Instead of using the economic meltdown to recast Detroit as I suggested back in November, the Dems have chosen to throw a bunch of money into the bottomless pit of the Big Three – Obama, like a plastic-suit wearing auto dealer,  is even promising to warranty your next GM purchase!  WTF?!?

In retrospect we should have just pulled the plug last fall, and put those billions into Tesla.