free market fundamentalism

Hobbled, We're Losing The Global Energy Race

Eric Lotke — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:01:13 -0400

When the U.S. added modest “Buy American” provisions to the February stimulus bill to help keep (some) U.S. assistance in the U.S. economy, people cried foul.

-- “A classic protectionist measure,” charged Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.) chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee.

-- “The worst instincts of Congress,” declared the Wall Street Journal.

-- “Counterproductive,” accused the Chamber of Commerce.

But while the U.S. dithers, the rest of the world is moving ahead on its own terms. The New York Times reports, “China Builds High Wall to Guard Energy Industry.”

Energy is key to the new economy of the future — key to end our dependence on foreign oil, advance new technologies and create new jobs. “We know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century,” explained President Obama in his February address to a joint session of Congress.

But leadership takes more than just hard work, technology or innovation. It takes place in a real world that isn’t always fair.

China is positioning itself for that leadership role. Just as Japan and South Korea sheltered their domestic automakers from American competition until they developed skills, products and economies of scale, China is shielding its clean energy sector while it matures and grows. The New York Times reports:

-- China’s exports over 95 percent of its solar energy products to the United States and Europe. But China required that at least 80 percent of the equipment in its own solar power plant be made in China.

-- The Chinese government bid 25 large contracts for wind turbines this spring — and Chinese companies won every one of them. All six competitive multinationals were disqualified on technical grounds. (Chinese companies that had never built a turbine won the contracts.)

-- China requires 70 percent domestic content for wind turbines installed in China. European manufacturers built turbine factories in China specifically to comply — but they still don’t win contracts, and many have stopped bidding.

-- While T. Boone Pickens delays plans for his American wind farm, China is building six wind farms twice Pickens' size – financed by low-interest loans from state-owned banks.

China isn’t alone. Public Citizen points out that the European Union and Canada negotiated to exclude broad swaths of government procurement from WTO and NAFTA (for Canada) requirements.

“[W]hile the United States safeguards its preferences (only) for domestic iron and steel used in federally funded state transportation projects, Canada carves out steel, motor vehicles and coal altogether (for all provinces, for all sectors), and also carves out all construction contracts issued by the Departments of Transport. The EU carved out of its WTO procurement obligations contracts awarded by federal governments and sub-federal governments in connection with activities in the areas of drinking water, energy, transport or telecommunications.” (Links added).

So in European countries, stimulus money stays in Europe — while U.S. stimulus money is free to bleed overseas to buy imported goods and equipment. While other countries use energy to grow domestic industry, the U.S. imports solar cells from China.

This isn’t about protectionism. It isn’t about the ethics of Chinese exclusion or American freedom. It’s about the real world.

While American ideologues talk free market purity, countries with intelligent, carefully considered industrial policies are pulling ahead of us. This is real world competition, not game-theory in think tanks. We’re losing jobs, hemorrhaging money and squandering the competitive advantage given us by generations before.

Next time you hear a conservative cry protectionism, think about that great wall in China. This is real world competition, and we’re playing with a handicap. We can do better.

Right-Wing Economics Should Go the Way of Soviet Communism

OurFuture.org Staff — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 14:03:57 -0500

More Water Woes

Tom Sullivan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:40:20 -0400

Rick Perlstein took up Atlanta's water problems yesterday, and I wanted to add my two cents. It's funny hearing Atlanta's water problems discussed as something recent.

The Associated Press reported in November how the drought had impacted residents of a Tennessee town north of Atlanta:

As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mayor wonders what the 4.5 million people in Atlanta will do. I have my own perspective on the problem.

As Richard Dreyfuss once said, “Well, this is not a boat accident! And it wasn’t any propeller; and it wasn’t any coral reef; and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper!” But for Atlanta, anyway, it wasn’t a shark or the drought either. It was overdevelopment.

The drought just precipitated the crisis that’s been a long time coming. Atlanta’s been sucking hard on the Flint River Aquifer for years without regard to what sprawl was doing to the water supply.

“Heavens, we can’t tell developers no. That would interfere with their personal freedom and right to put their land to its ‘highest and best use’.”

In 1998, I put in a wastewater neutralization system for a lens coating operation in an office park in Alpharetta, north of Atlanta. I asked what the small out-building was at the edge of the parking lot. The Culligan rep told me it was a well house (in an upscale office park!).

He knew clients (including hospitals) drilling wells all over Atlanta because the county wouldn’t let people use all the water they wanted (both because of the MSD infrastructure capacity and water source limits, I think). So they were drilling their own wells to get unmetered water.

I was on the edge of another client’s lawsuit in Duluth, GA, in 1999 when the county reneged on its water contract to supply the water needed for a new, water-heavy manufacturing operation we helped design.

The drought is just the straw that’s broken the camel’s back. The Flint River Aquifer has been under strain for a decade as Atlanta keeps growing, the developers keep developing, and the water supply keeps shrinking.

It was only a matter of time before the taps started running dry. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Anyone who raises the alarm is an anti-business kook.

For years, I’ve wondered when we’d start seeing bumper stickers that said, “Suppose they gave a subdivision and nobody came?”

Maybe soon, now.

From the LA Times last November:

But experts say the Southeast’s struggles over water resources are far from over.
“What was not on the table, and what has got to be on the table, is Atlanta’s unrestricted growth and cavalier attitude to water use,” said Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a watchdog group.

[. . .]

“Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behemoth of a city incapable of hearing the word ‘no’ and dealing with it,” said a recent editorial in the Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.

The editorial said Atlanta’s “politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit.”

A friend at CNN told me last week that having a conspicuous well in your front yard (for landscaping) has become a status symbol in Atlanta's fashionable Buckhead neighborhood.

There is sowing, and then there is reaping.

Manufacturing a Food Crisis

Brian Dockstader — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:08:29 -0400

How "free trade" is destroying Third World agriculture--and who's fighting back.

Pay-to-play Politics

Terrance Heath — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:36:11 -0500

Legislators who raise money rise to the top. Those who can't, fall farther and farther behind. Money is the yardstick for success in conservative government. Performance is irrelevant. Tom Delay’s notorious K Street Project was all about using government money to reward campaign contributors in a mutually rewarding quest for power—leaving the public behind.

Related Conservative Failures

Quagmire in Iraq

When Bush crony Joseph Albaugh left FEMA to start a consulting company to held businesses drum up opportunities in war-torn Iraq, part of what he was selling was his government experience—his intimate knowledge about where to place the right contributions to get what you want. read more »

Failing Hurricane Katrina Victims

HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson admitted that he hands out contracts based on their loyalty to President Bush. And one way, of course, to show your loyalty to a politician is to raise money for them. read more »

Rotting Regulatory Standards

When removing one tiny line in a massive federal statute can mean millions more profit for your company, is it any wonder business tries to buy access? read more »

More conservative failures

Disdain for Government > Pay-To-Play

What could better demonstrate conservative contempt for government than their literal attempt to institutionalize the power of a single political party? As Nick Confessore wrote in the Washington Monthly in 2003:

When presidents pick someone to fill a job in the government, it's typically a very public affair. The White House circulates press releases and background materials. Congress holds a hearing, where some members will pepper the nominee with questions and others will shower him or her with praise. If the person in question is controversial or up for an important position, they'll rate a profile or two in the papers. But there's one confirmation hearing you won't hear much about. It's convened every Tuesday morning by Rick Santorum, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, in the privacy of a Capitol Hill conference room, for a handpicked group of two dozen or so Republican lobbyists. Occasionally, one or two other senators or a representative from the White House will attend. Democrats are not invited, and neither is the press.

The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs—specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington's K Street. This canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House is to influence peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street.

That's the world of pay-for-play politics that conservative control has ushered in—a political machine as notorious as anything Boss Tweed could have dreamed up in 19th- century New York. San Diego congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham literally drew up a "bribe menu" specifying the amount it would take to get him to put earmarks into bills. Cunningham ended up in jail. Other malefactors have simply lost their jobs. But pay-for-play politics won't be going away until conservatives give up their addiction to money and their contempt for government—and that's not going to happen any time soon.

Free Market Fundamentalism> Pay-To-Play

K Street Project

Incredible as it may seem, conservatives don't consider such corruption incidental to their governing project. They see it as crucial. With their contempt for the idea of a disinterested civil service, they look at corporate influence peddling as a normal part of the operations of the free market. There's even a highly developed sub-discipline of economics, called "public choice," which argues that civil servants, with their salary and their conscience and their bureaucracies as their only incentive to do a good job, can't possibly do a good job. Only someone with "skin in the game" is supposed to be motivated to work for the public—by working, of course, for their own self-interest. It's the only kind of interests conservatives can grasp.

Deliberately and with malice aforethought, conservatives have been dismantling the checks, balances and transparency that made our country great. From legal campaign contributions to illegal junkets, government now serves the wealthy few, not the American people as a whole.

How Conservatism Caused This Failure...

Disdain for Government

Why not condone buying your way into government when your official ideology is that you don't even respect government in the first place? read more »

Ends Justify the Means

Crazy as it seems, conservatives can justify pay-to-play politics for ideological reasons—because it helps discredit government, and that's the end they're after. read more »

Free Market Fundamentalism

Since conservatives miscast anything having to do with business as part of the free market, it's easy for them to excuse the actual harm to freedom brought by pay-to-play politics. read more »

Corporate Welfare

When government's for sale, what corporation wouldn't demand, from the politicians they've bought and paid for, special favors out of the public purse? read more »

Cronyism

In order to pay to play, the big boys have to let you step up to the window in the first place. It's not just money that buys access in conservative government, it's who you know. read more»

Deregulation

When removing one tiny line in a massive federal statute can mean millions more profit for your company, is it any wonder business tries to buy access? read more

Free Market Fundamentalism

Terrance Heath — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:15:04 -0500

"The best minds are not in government; if they were, business would steal them away."
(Ronald Reagan)

"The average Halliburton hand knows more about the world than the average member of Congress."
(Dick Cheney)

Conservatives disdain government and worship the private sector. They think that all government regulation of private enterprise is bad, and that everything done for profit will be done well. Conservatives seem to forget that the purpose of profit is profit, not public service. Business interests might line up with the interests of government and taxpayers, but they might not—especially when it comes to providing public goods and services ranging from military operations to rebuilding levees.

Related Conservative Failures

Quagmire in Iraq

Soldiers take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and are accountable to a uniform code of military justice. But by turning over more and more of the functions of soldiering over to private contractors like Blackwater, those codes of justice evaporate—making our defenses weaker and leaving our international reputation in tatters. read more »

Abandoning Patients at Walter Reed

The very nature of government contracts require government monitors. Which gives lie to the idea that market discipline alone forces contractors to do the best job. Instead, unwatched contractors can more easily can hide their incompetence—until, as at Walter Reed, the rat droppings become too plentiful to ignore. read more »

Rotting Regulatory Standards

The financial winners in a free market aren't necessarily the firms that deliver the best service. They're sometimes the firms that can do the best job of hiding incompetence from the customer—aided and abetted by the conservative obsession with eliminating the watchdogs. read more »

More conservative failures

Government is supposed to be on the side of the people. But conservative government is on the side of business. The result is a culture of waste and corruption that demeans everybody and serves only the privileged few.

Symptoms of Free Market Fundamentalism

Deregulation

Sometimes regulations can be burdensome and inefficient, and work against the public interest. But conservatives foolishly insist that this is always the case—they've never met a regulation that didn't want to see slashed. This they call "liberty." But true liberty, which requires strong institutions and structures of fairness in order to thrive, is often the first casualty of deregulation. read more»

Cronyism

Conservatives fundamentally trust markets more than government so they kneecap the referee of market competition—government. From the promotion of deregulation to the embrace of no-bid contracting, conservatives destroy the brakes that keep cronyism and corruption from hurting the public good. read more»

Corporate Welfare

One hand washes the other, and when you turn over the functions of government to your rich supporters, it isn't long before more and more of the resources of government are turned over to their corporations as well—subsidies that made a mockery of the idea of a truly "free" market. read more»

Crumbling Infrastructure

Somehow the conservative fetish for "free markets" never includes providing for the kind of huge public investments—roads, bridges, electricity grids, and watersheds—that are the basic foundation for prosperity. read more»

Pay-to-Play Politics

Conservative "freedom" often turns into payoffs—political contributions—that unlock the doors to Senate offices. The competition isn't over who can do the job done best, but who can grease the most palms. read more»