Released Emails Show Wind Lobby, Soros Group Helped with White House PR (PJM Exclusive — Read the Emails Here)
And so are YOU. This is pretty cool.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds has the meat of it.
It seems that our new category, “Unbelievably Stupid Ideas”, is gonna get more play than I thought it would.
Ilya Somin has an update on the regrettable Kelo v City of New London decision ::: and its aftermath:
For years, the site of the property condemned in the controversial Kelo v. City of New London case has stood empty. Now however, there are recent reports that the city of New London has found a developer interested in building townhouses on the site (see here andhere) [HT: my RA Eva Choi, and Michael O’Malley of the Yale University Press].
Several previous plans to develop on the condemned property have gone under. In November, the Pfizer Corporation, whose lobbying helped instigate the initial takings, announced the planned closing of its headquarters in New London. That step further reduced the likelihood that anything will be built in the area. It remains to be soon whether the townhouse development will work out better than these previous efforts. At present, it is not clear how much the new project will cost taxpayers, and a news report indicates that “[c]onstruction on the project will not occur any time soon.”
Even if the townhouses are eventually built, it is unlikely that they will generate enough development to offset the value of the numerous homes and businesses wiped out by the condemnations, the opportunity cost of having the area lie empty for years, and the over $80 million in public funds already expended on the project.
Ironically, much of the condemned area was a lower-middle class residential neighborhood before the takings, and New London’s current plan is to use the land for roughly the same purpose. The City could have “achieved” this result at far lower cost simply by leaving the neighborhood alone in the first place. Taken as a whole, the Kelo story exemplifies the ways in which “economic development” takings not only victimize property owners, but also often destroy more development than they create (see also my more extended discussion inthis article, which cites figures for the costs of the Kelo takings).
Ilya has added an update worth checking out. Me linky. You clicky.
Thank god that the Democrats are in control finally so that the special interests and lobbyists are no longer … uh … oh, wait :::
Lobbyists for healthcare, energy and financial interests had a banner year in 2009, with the average payout for each reaching as high as $177,000.
Despite his push to rein in special interests, President Barack Obama sparked a boom on K Street with major new proposals on healthcare, climate change and financial policies.
“The magnitude of the work done in the three fields is just huge,” said Michael Levy, of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck’s Washington office.
New lobbying restrictions led to a decline in the number of registered lobbyists working for clients in each of the three industries, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The combination of more work for fewer lobbyists meant record payouts per lobbyist.
Lobbyists working in each of the three industries took home the most on average that they have in a decade, even when adjusted for inflation, according to analysis of the data by The Hill.
Many lobbyists work for clients in several policy areas, so the average payout by industry doesn’t necessarily equal the average overall compensation those lobbyists received. Spending was up in all three broad areas of healthcare, energy and financial-services reforms.
Healthcare clients spent the most overall on lobbying at $544 million, which was roughly $60 million more than in 2008. But there were more lobbyists (3,405) on healthcare issues than on either energy (2,311) or financial legislation (2,654).
Lobbyists earned an average of $160,000 for healthcare-related work.
Energy clients paid $409 million for an average of $177,000 per lobbyist. Lobbyists for energy clients beat out financial lobbyists for top billing.
That, combined with this story have me just shaking my head at all those hopey changey types :::
Barack Obama has long decried the corrupting influence of money in politics. As a candidate, he ran against lobbyists and the pay-for-play culture of Washington. As president, he has continued to hammer the theme, most recently in his impassioned attacks on the Supreme Court’s ruling inCitizens United v Federal Election Commission.
Given this, it’s a little surprising to learn that Obama has not only embraced the sordid money-driven culture of DC, but actually outdone his predecessors. An analysis by the American Foreign Service Association, for example, found that Obama has stuffed the diplomatic corps with more political appointees (i.e., cronies) than any president in the past 40 years. Only a year into the administration, close of half of the president’s biggest donors already have federal jobs.
But I already blogged about that.
What saddens me about this the most, is that I am just not surprised :::
You remember that “Constitution” thingy? You know, the anachronism from a bygone era, which Democrat politicians and judges take an oath to uphold and then promptly forget about — or claim that it’s a “living and breathing” document?
To show you how far left the Democrat Party has moved over the last couple of decades, a serious debate appears to be raging within the party over the role of the United States Senate. Not just procedures like the filibuster, mind you, but whether there actually should be a Senate at all.
Go read the whole thing [including an excellent brief history lesson on why we have checks and balances].
I am reminded once again how few people realize that we do not live in a democracy; we live in a consitutional republic. Given how the populace at large thinks, while I am certainly not in love with how our republic is functioning, moving toward more “democracy” would obviously be worse.
Mob rule.
Why do I get the feeling that precious few have read the Federalist Papers?
Micky Kaus over at slate.com has a good roundup and excellent commentary on the atrocious state of schools in Los Angeles [and I am sure other areas are similar].
Quotable bits :::
Unions vs. Liberalism, Part XXIIII: If you are a liberal who believes in public education, do not let the teachers’ unions do to your school system what the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) has done to the L.A. Unified School District–make it so hard to fire a bad teacher that most school principals don’t even try. According to an L.A. Weeklyinvestigation, the school district itself seems to have given up:
In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — andonly four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
[W]e also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining. [E.A.]
That’s less than one attempted firing a year. Why? Mainly because firings–and the bad performance evaluations that precede them–are almost invariably contested by the union. Firings must go through an expensive and protracted hearing and appeals process: “Documents show only one instance in the past 10 years in which an LAUSD teacher accepted his firing and left without a fight or big payment.” [E.A.]
Go read the rest on your own.
Speaking of Unions and other insane use of public funds that fly in the face of common sense. This is a bit old now, but in case you missed it ::: Willie Brown can talk common sense ‘cuz he is no longer in office.
In the UPS vs FedEx fight, UPS us running to daddy and wants the government to place additional labor rules on FedEx. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
From Reason.com ::: [Watch the video at the link]
You may have heard the UPS is in quite the fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s—and more than twice as expensive.
So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor. That’s horrendous, but it also makes a sick kind of business sense. And it also reveals the real villain: A government that is big enough to absolutely, positively guarantee it can screw any business. Overnight.
Barack Obama has long decried the corrupting influence of money in politics. As a candidate, he ran against lobbyists and the pay-for-play culture of Washington. As president, he has continued to hammer the theme, most recently in his impassioned attacks on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.
Given this, it’s a little surprising to learn that Obama has not only embraced the sordid money-driven culture of DC, but actually outdone his predecessors. An analysis by the American Foreign Service Association, for example, found that Obama has stuffed the diplomatic corps with more political appointees (i.e., cronies) than any president in the past 40 years. Only a year into the administration, close of half of the president’s biggest donors already have federal jobs.
Below is a list of Obama campaign bundlers and the taxpayer-funded positions they’ve received:
Go read the list for yourself.
Patterico has the summary :::
This surge in claims puts a damper on the last report, in which the unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly. However, it is consistent with the recent trend of unemployment news being “unexpectedly” bad again and again and again and again and again and well, you get the picture…
At what point does the WH press corp as this question ::: “ummm…Mr Press Secretary? We are less interested in the numbers and more interested in how you can keep a straight face while declaring these “unexpected”?”
Actually, I am curious when we can expect them to adjust their expectations to expect the unexpected.
Jeeeeeesuuuuuusssss.
This what happens when you have someone or some organization [in this case an administration] who/that divorces policy from results. It is as if they do not understand that when you hold out an object at shoulder height and allow it to drop, that…uh..gravity will take over. For them, when they hold it out, they still expect it to float and the fact that the object drops is “unexpected”.
Economics and basic laws of physics. Both are mysterious and mythical forces to most politicians [and sadly, most of the populace].
Update ::: Gatewaypundit has a useful graph on the Administration’s projections versus … reality. Check it out here.
Tragic. The US government nationalizing and bailing out major financial institutions it helped to destoy...
I am a libertarian. To contrast this with Democrat and Republican: we might say that the Republicans (at their core) want the government to stay out of our financial lives, but control what we do in our bedrooms (morality/religion). Democrats (at their core) want the government out of our bedrooms, but control how we manage our financial affairs (welfare/regulation/wealth redistribution). Libertarians want the government out of our financial lives and out of our bedrooms. Libertarians stand for the individual rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness according to our own conscience. They believe that the purpose of government is to protect the freedom and rights of citizens through a police force to protect us from the initiation of force by other citizens, court system to protect us from fraud (enforce contracts), and a military force to protect us from foreign invaders. The libertarian stance on foreign aggression is: commerce with all nations, alliances with none. Libertarians not only want us out of Iraq, they want us out of Japan! (and our other 800+ military bases around the world!) Let them hate us for our freedom and wealth, without the military presence/force that forces that freedom and wealth down their throats.
My reasons for being libertarian are simple. I believe that history has demonstrated (in every time. and in every part of the globe) that the more power you give to government, the more those who hold the power will be corrupted by lobbyists (business, religious, bankers, racists, populists, etc.). As PJ O'Rourke put it, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." The more money and favors/regulations the government controls, the more money and favors the lobbyists can afford to spend to buy them, because (although it is somewhat of a gamble) the return on investment for lobbying is typically 10 to 1. As a lobbyist, I can spend $50 million dollars influencing various politicians in order to get a $500 million dollar annual contract, and $1 billion to get $100 billion contract. Smart business always follows the clearest incentives, and competing for government largess is clearly incentived. People/politicians are corruptible (especially through blackmail, which money buys easily), and so governments become corrupt. The solution is to reduce government power to reduce the scope and destructiveness of its corruption and keep it maximally accountable to its core functions. Hence, Libertarianism. The American Constitution/experiment, was created by men whom, by todays standards, are radical Libertarians, for the exact reasons stated above. I believe that they created the most beautiful social contract in human history, and I find it tragic that it is being increasingly ignored and distorted. I am patriotic in this sense: I believe that the ideals and values of life, liberty/freedom, protection of our right to use our property according to our own conscience (as long as we are not violating the identical rights of others) are worth cheering about and if necessary, fighting to maintain.
Some of you may have seen the post by Deepak Chopra about Sarah Palin, in which he psycho-eviscerates those who find value or some type of agreement with the positions she takes.
Upon reading it several times, I became progressively dismayed, although fascinated by the clarity with which it typifies “green/Boomeritis” arrogance, including the hypocrisy and self-refuting logic at its heart. This article examplifies a common stance taken by those whom I consider the most politically active people in my life. My opinion, which I offer reasons for below, is that it expresses a fundamentally dishonest and destructive perspective that is at the heart of much of the “transformational” community’s conversation about politics.
Specifically, it is built on a narrative that claims/implies that it is inclusive and integrative (2nd tier, in Spiral Dynamics terms) , but is deeply self-absorbed and parochial (1st tier), and hence blind to its blindness.
It is written as if it is the only rational perspective possible, as if Deepak (and by extension Obama, or the reverse) are so right that there is no need for conversation about the accuracy of their propositions and conclusions, only about how to deal with them. This marginalizes all the values of people they disagree with – the very thing that their stance accuses all other perspectives of.
Deepak (and those who agree with and write similar pieces) pretend as if the “ground” that he is standing on and writing from represents an “enlightened/superior/higher” perspective BECAUSE it includes more information than its competing perspectives (in this case, conservatives like Palin). However, he demonstrates no understanding of the people he is critiquing. In place of understanding, he creates a straw man that burns so easily they he feels the need to apologize for how cruel he must seem to destroy his opponent so utterly. It is as if his opponent is so obviously wrong he doesn’t even need to establish the verity of his points, all there is left to do talk about their consequences…
Examples: In almost every sentence, he speaks an an unquestionable authority, and with a tone that indicates that disagreement is a sign of the stupidity that he is decrying (and, as it is said, you can’t argue with a sneer):
- Impulses that are different than those He (Barack and Deepak) promotes are “their worst impulses.”
- BECAUSE He calls people to “higher impulses,” Palin’s responses and values (and others who disagree with Obama’s policies) can by DEFINITION be simplified to “anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other” , and hence written off as unworthy of consideration or inclusion.
- “Small town values” become “a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.” – (What the hell?)
- “Family values” become “anti social justice.” (Huh?)
- Patriotism becomes “a fallback from a failed war.” (I know my patriotism is sourced from this…)
- her political position, including all of the changes she wants to make becomes “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.” – (of course, to disagree with someone who wants a specific change is to be against change in general. I knew that…)
He says: “there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. ” Well, if it is so obvious, why can’t they see it? because they are stupid? because they are victims of patriarchal bourgeoisie values (which they are too stupid to go beyond)? How about because they believe that feminism is a postmodern movement that is nihilistic in nature, substance, and rhetoric, and proposes ideals that conservatives like Palin believe are destructive and soul-deadening to living, breathing people? Such a response is simply not a possible legitimate stance to take in this article. It does not exist as a possiblity in Deepak’s world.
This is the hypocrisy. Lack of understanding leads to projection of the enemy onto Palin – against which Deepak establishs his hero stature, which stature is supposedly integrated, compassionate, and wise. All bullshit.
AND, the intellectual elite of the country and the political left do not even question or challenge him. This article has been sent to me by 4 different people – more than any other political article yet this election cycle. All of them have included positive or self-congratulatory introductions to it. None have mentioned its utter arrogance. So, here I am…
Jason Alexander (the philosopher of capitalism, not the actor), used to chide me, saying “Remember, people get the government they deserve. If the people are unWholeSum, the government will be unWholeSum.” I have spent the last decade losing my will to try to prove him wrong. Welcome to election year 2008.
This article is even more painful for me because I have severe concerns about the conservative side of this issue as well. However, an enemy of my enemy is rarely my friend, just as two wrongs don’t make a right, and someone disagreeing with someone who is wrong is not thereby correct.
Sad times for the most beautiful political experiement/culture in history – the American Revolution of Self-Responsibility and Individual Rights.
Over at EU Referendum we see the Director’s Cut of Qana.
The narrative here is of how the combination of Hezbollah’s media management and modern photo-journalism has turned the recording of a tragic event into theatre, in the best tradition of Michael Moore.
As best we can, we have pieced together the jumble of evidence which surrounded the production of the iconic photographs which were published around the world, and put them in perspective. Many of the photographs have been used before, some are new to this site and others are video “grabs”. But it is not the pictures, per se, that tell the story, so much as their ordering and analysis. Make of this what you will, but I can assure you that you are not supposed to see them in this light.
The “story” – for that is what it is – starts here, in the wreckage of the buiding at Qana which is performing the temporary and unwholesome function of a morgue. It is from here, that the bodies are extracted, the essential props of this theatre. And standing on the left of the frame is one of the two star characters of our story, Mr “White Tee-Shirt”. With equal accuracy, though, we could call him Mr Hezbollah, for reasons which will become apparent [...]
Captain Ed has a great post about Yale’s courtship and eventual rejection of Hashemi, the Taliban’s former diplomat at large. Quotable:
It’s odd that Yale would have trotted out the diversity argument, considering the regime that Hashemi represented. Let’s recall that the Taliban beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe and men for shaving their faces. Ancient Buddhist carvings, considered artistic and historical treasures, exist no more thanks to Taliban tolerance. The Taliban also reintroduced the lovely Islamic tradition of tolerance by crushing homosexuals to death or throwing them off of towers.
The latter point seems especially germane when it comes to Yale. After all, they have taken the position that the American military cannot stage ROTC classes at the campus due to their “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuals in the military (which I also oppose, for several reasons). Yale’s students and faculty argued that the university would benefit from having Hashemi’s diverse viewpoint represented on campus, but they kicked out the military for a much milder viewpoint and action than that of Hashemi and his colleagues.And while they argue that Hashemi would have benefited the Yale community by his inclusion, no one appears to wonder whether Yale students might benefit from having the ROTC on campus and the diversity of political opinion it might create.
Yale invited Hashemi — he didn’t just show up and fill out an application. They went out of their way to get him to choose Yale, because as their admissions office stated, they didn’t want to lose another “high profile” candidate to Harvard. Regardless of all the arguments about diversity and openness, all of which get belied by Yale’s policies towards the American military, Yale obviously chose Hashemi as a tweak at the Bush administration. They thought that Hashemi’s presence would embarrass the White House and give Yale some sort of moral authority.
Instead, they have demonstrated themselves to be hypocrites, and still do with this decision.
Most disturbing about all this, however, is the initial observation made by the WSJ’s editorial writers: “A single liberal retirement from the Court would thus put Hamdan‘s reasoning in jeopardy.”
How can this be? How can it be that we’ve reached the point where highly-charged SCOTUS decisions often break along partisan / ideological lines? (And before you go noting Kennedy’s break, note, too, that Kennedy defected on Kelo, as well, expanding “public good” to mean “whatever a local municipality can justify by arguing that it will bring in more revenue”. And to be fair, I think Scalia guilty of the same flawed “reasoning” in Raich).
The answer to why this is now so, I think—how “reasoning” become so completely relativistic—is that we no longer have a unified strategy for how to interpret, with the idea of a Living Constitution often acting as a judicial shortcut for failed legislative initiatives, which has the practical effect of codifying a strained (and logically problematic) idea of interpretation and how it is made to work, allowing its proponents to move back and forth between readings that cite legislative intent and readings that deny the importance of that intent in new and different “contexts.”
Be sure to read the whole thing
Great video that sums up my sentiments, to be sure. Woo-hoo!
Bloomberg has become so used to being chaffeured about that he’s either forgotten (or never knew) that there are times when acceleration is necessary for passing, merging, etc., and that preventing people from speeding on occasion will likely create more safety hazards than simply continuing to police speeders as the city presumably does now. That such nannystatist programs—proferred always in the name of public safety but used, primarily, as a way to increase revenues—continue cropping up, leads me to believe that what we really need is a device placed on Mayors that light up everytime these bored petty tyrants do something other than, say, cut the ribbon at some mall opening, or fire up the Bat signal, should the Penguin get all uppity.
That way, at least people will have time to hide their wallets.
Indeed.
It is a long-ish article using Detroit as the American problem model, but any City could learn from it, including my own San Francisco:
[...] It needs to be said at the outset that no government in the U.S., not even Detroit’s, has ever imposed the kind of crushing regulations that the Indian government imposed during the height of the notorious License Raj in the mid-’50s. Key industries—steel, telecommunications, airlines—were nationalized, but even more harmful was the Kafkaesque web of regulations that the remaining private businesses had to endure in the name of ensuring a “rational allocation of resources.”
Every move of private industry, big or small, was subject to licensing. Forget setting up a new plant or a factory. If an enterprise wanted to buy or import equipment, change its product mix, or even produce more than its allotted quota for a product, it had to first obtain permission from the Directorate General of Technical Development, a process that could take years and a small fortune in bribes, points out Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound and former CEO of Procter & Gamble, India. “Large business houses set up parallel bureaucracies in Delhi to follow up on files, organize bribes, and win licenses,” he recalls.
Confronted with a massive fiscal crisis and the prospect of defaulting on its international debt obligations, the Indian government dismantled much of this ridiculous licensing regime in 1991. In a bid to boost exports to replenish the country’s empty foreign exchange reserves, it also eliminated all import licensing and slashed tariffs on capital goods. Both were relics of India’s import-substitution days, when manufacturers were discouraged from buying equipment from abroad in order to build the domestic industry. This jacked up production costs and made the country’s exports hopelessly uncompetitive.
Trade liberalization was a boon for the I.T. industry, which already had escaped many of the stultifying controls that other industries faced simply because the architects of India’s industrial policy had failed to anticipate its birth. [...]
read the rest on your own.
The Department of Homeland Stupidity is a site I just discovered a couple of days ago. Most of it good, some of it a little off–like their running debunked stories being recycled by Rolling Stone. Debunked. Anyway, more interestingly, by coincidence I ran accross a web developers blog who mentioned the Tempus Fugit Blog who has a post [now we are getting to it] about his first post to The Dept. of Homeland Stupidity. And in his excerpt of his own post, he is spot on:
On paper, Republicans are easily more favorable than Democrats to a libertarian-minded person such as myself. On paper, they support lower taxes, less socialism, limited government, a rigid interpretation of the Constitution, property rights, parental rights and gun rights. In practice, they do little to permanently relieve the tax burden, they support wealth redistribution in a variety of forms, they’ve bloated the government to an unprecedented degree, they’ve made a mockery of Amendments One, Four, Six, Eight and Ten, they’ve been slow and inadequate in their response to the Supreme Court’s eminent domain decision. That leaves parental rights and gun rights. So if all you want to do is to teach your kid that God created the world in seven 24-hour periods or shoot empty beer cans for fun, the Republican Party has your back. Otherwise, it’s time to wake up and realize you’ve been duped.
Great piece here — over at Real Clear Politics. It begins thusly:
The highest-ranking Democrat in America, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, described the Senate bill making English the national language of the American people as “racist.” And the New York Times editorial page labeled the bill “xenophobic.”
Welcome to the thoughtless world of contemporary liberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality.
One-word put-downs of opponents’ ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual — their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors — liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm.
This is easy to demonstrate.
Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ: [...]
It is an efficent and compact piece and is well worth the 4.27 minutes to go read it now.
“Our freedom is not inherited. It’s been earned and it has been by each new generation, as it must be.”
“You may find people who will contend that patriotism is something to be a little bit embarrassed about or that honor is somewhat outdated as a notion and that concentrating on America’s imperfection makes you a realist. Not so. That’s the sign of a cynic. Being a cynic is easy. You can just sit back, heckle from the cheap seats, while others serve, storm beaches, build nations, meet their destinies. Idealists write history’s stirring chapters; cynics read those chapters and seem not to understand. Choose to be an idealist. There have always been those who contend that what’s wrong with the world is America. Don’t believe it.”
“It is the power of freedom that has helped each successive generation of patriots prevail over every form of tyranny, even when success seemed unlikely, and that was often…”
As I was preparing to sit down for a nice brunch with my wife today before we made our way over to the ballpark for the Sunday afternoon Giants game, I read this article by Al Saracevic in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. Essentially, Al’s point seemed to be that oil companies are making lots and lots of money, and also that the response thus far from politicians has been less than inspiring.
I don’t disagree. But I was left feeling like there was a great deal of GOOD news that Saracevic had ignored in his column. So I wrote him the following email:
“Thought provoking stuff today.
There is an upside to the higher gas prices, of course, part of which is simply that people will be driving less (as the Chronicle reported on Page One this week.) More carpooling and public tranist use will result. People will weigh fuel economy more heavily when considering their next vehicle purchase. Those are GOOD things, right?
Also, as gas prices rise, alternative energy sources become relatively more attractive. So, there’s another benefit: powerful stimulus to the development and use of (greener) alternatives.
There may be frustration in some quarters that market forces will accomplish what endless TV pieces, Op-Eds and Public Service Announcements so far have not been able to achieve — making a real, widespread change in American behavior. But let’s face it, many of us make a change when we feel some pinch of discomfort, not when it vaguely “seems like a good idea.”
Oh, and one other thing: the numbers you quoted in todays column about oil revenue seem huge. Heck, they ARE huge. But one needs some context to properly understand them. I’m not sure your readers got that context from your piece today (perhaps in a follow-up piece?)
I think the following speaks powerfully to the questiton of “oil profiteering”. (Via Instapundit):
‘ From 1986 to 2003, using 2004 dollars, the real national annual average price for gasoline, including taxes, generally has been below $2 per gallon,” noted the Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 report absolving the industry of collusion. “By contrast, between 1919 and 1985, real national annual average retail gasoline prices were above $2 per gallon more often than not.”
In other words, gasoline prices were lower than at anytime since 1919 for much of recent history. Some conspiracy! Maybe somebody should have been investigating consumers for “gouging” the oil companies.
And just who is the profiteer here? While the average profit on the sale of a gallon of gasoline is nine cents, the average state and federal tax on that same gallon of gasoline is about 45 cents (and 52 cents in Michigan). And if we must have an investigation, how about investigating the extent to which government regulations drive up prices and block new production?
Management guru Peter Drucker once remarked, with his usual drollery, that profit is “whatever government lets a company keep.” But most folks have a vastly inflated view of corporate profits. One regular survey of Americans found that the majority believes the average corporate profit is between 30 percent and 40 percent of sales, while the real figure is closer to 4 percent.
Washington should cool its carburetors. The pursuit of profit is one of the main engines of Western progress and prosperity. And as people in my neck of the woods are fast learning, it is only out of profit that we can afford to pay for a comfortable retirement. As profits in the steel, airline and auto industries erode or even vanish, so do pensions and health care benefits, not to mention jobs. ‘
I encourage you to read the entire thing here. ”
JASON ADDS: it is not just that higher prices make alternatives more attractive. Additionally, it actually makes them economically viable to explore. Not just greener energies, but also shale oil and other difficult [read: expensive] points of extraction and extraction methods for fossil fuels. Right now bio-diesel [that cool soybean/vegetable oil fuel] is still more costly than a gallon of gasoline. Supply and demand limited production.
Additionally, while record profits have been recorded for oil co’s recently, that is a gross number, rather than a percentage of revenue. As a percentage of revenue, profits have remained largely the same–at about 10% 9.4% recently [can't find source I read days ago]. When oil companies raise the cost of gasoline, it is because _their_ costs have increased. Article on basic economics of price controls [that far too many are ignorant on and of] here. If gov’t really wanted to do something about gas prices rather than just grandstanding, they would relax environmental regulations on building refineries and expanding that capacity, they would do away wth boutique additives and mixtures of same that require certain regions, states, and municipalities to sell specific mixtures — they would _standardize it_ or repeal it altogether and they would forget about enthanol [it is more expensive as an additive than MTBE], but again, environmental regulations and exposure to liability drove the oil co’s away from MTBE. AND the Senate would permit drilling in ANWR and our costal areas. Canada and Cuba are doing it anyway in areas we will not allow ourselves to.
If they were serious, they would have these items as a to-do list and educate the public after [probably and sadly] educating themselves about basic economics. A politician making decisions about economic policy is the equivalent of a professional wrestler making decisions for the NFL’s competition committee; they might watch the game, but they have no real idea about what is happening and how.
UPDATE JASON further adds: a great piece on perspective and profit here comparing Exxon [9.4%] profit to GE/NBC [60%!!] and adds a few others for good measure. My conclusion? PRICE GOUGING FOR ADVERTISING BY NBC. Let’s call for immediate investigations!
A-fucking-men. Hear here. And all that. What? you’ve no idea what I am aligning with?
Read THIS. Sample:
I did not see every second of it, but my wife did, and she joins me in noting that there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace — as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving, not one prayer or moment of silence for the dead and maimed.
Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the
war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars’ ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.
The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.
The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.
If you are not reading Ed Driscoll’s blog on a regular basis, well, you ought to be. And there is really no reason I am linking to this post other than you gotta dig a conservative who references a prince song subtly in the title of a post.
That’s not exactly true. I think this is a good time to get away from the left-right thinking and once again plug a more comprehensive political map. Take the test.
Somehow “dumb idea” doesn’t quite convey the scope of this decision by the Bush Administration:
WASHINGTON – Two Republican governors on Monday questioned a Bush administration decision allowing an Arab-owned company to operate six major U. S. ports, saying they may try to cancel lease arrangements at ports in their states.
New York Gov. George Pataki and Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich voiced doubts about the acquisition of a British company that has been running the U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World, a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates.
The British company, Peninsular and Oriental, runs major commercial operations at ports in Baltimore, Miami, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia.
“Ensuring the security of New York’s port operations is paramount and I am very concerned with the purchase of Peninsular & Oriental Steam by Dubai Ports World,” Pataki said in a news release.
According to the FBI, most of the funding for the 9/11 attacks came though UAE financial institutions. All it takes is this and Iran [with the shipped flagged UAE] floating a nuke into one of these ports on a cargo ship and we are fucked.
I am going to be generous and say that they just did nto think this through and they better fucking start thinking things through.
At least the governors still seem to have their wits about them. Jesus.
MAJOR UPDATE: Maybe I spoke too soon. Suddenly I am fascinated. This has become quite an interesting item with the President threatening a veto [it would be his first ever] of any legislation to bar this deal. Frist has spoken of overriding it. Hmmm.
Instapundit has a full round-up. Just go over there and keep on scrolling down this post.
More up-to-date UPDATE:
more at LGF.
This image of Pakistani protestors appeared on Germany’s TV station n-tv.de.
Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.
I don’t know about you, but seeing this picture makes me want to go out and by some Danish products.
Last July 4th I wrote a piece defending our Founding Fathers against the accusation of being equivalent to Terrorists. In it, I pointed out that to call American Patriots terrorists was to sabotage the meaning of the word “terrorism.” It might be semantically possible, but it is spin doctoring at its worse.
Now, I would like to point out a similar dilution of language around what have been called “protests” by Muslim fanatics who are burning Italian embassies for Mohammed cartoons about that were published in Denmark. To call these acts “protests” is both to dignify them beyond their due, and to cast a pall on the
great tradition of social protest. These acts of vandalism and destruction are not organized attempts to raise the consciousness of a culture, but pointless and chaotic expressions of hate, fear, and frustration.
I can hear the liberal revisionists screaming at me even now – who am I to determine what is or is not a legitimate protest? Didn’t our Founding Fathers destroy property and kill to communicate their sense of injustice? Aren’t these protests the equivalent of our own revolutionary beginnings?
Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I suggest that rebelling against your government for political freedom is fundamentally different than mindless vandalism against innocents out of a desire to control the world. American Patriots were not rebelling against the British to force the British to believe their beliefs but fighting so that each person could have their own. They were not offering million dollar rewards to quell the speech of (murder) the cartoonists that dared to disagree with them, but fighting for the freedom of speech for all.
To highlight the difference between considered social protest to further the rights of all and mindless rioting against innocents to silence the rights of others, I suggest we spin the language to its limits and elevate these “protests” to the status of rebellion – The Cartoon Rebellions. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Only these aren’t rebels without a cause, only rebels without a clue.
The Cartoon Rebellions – a world-wide swath of destruction so absurd that we would think it was a bad comic strip. Cartoons causing people to act like cartoons, while cartoon apologists strive to find politically correct ways to appease the rioters. An elaborate joke that would be hilarious if it were not so tragic, unbelievable if it were not so real.
Over at the Jawa Report.