Sometimes you just have to pick up and leave the toxic waste…
Calvin Tillman, the mayor of the town of Dish, Texas is moving out after natural gas drilling has made his town unlivable.
It all sounded so appealing. The nice men at the gas company assured them they were experts who knew what they were doing and that the process of removing the gas from the ground (called fracking) was safe. The money was a welcome boom for a sleepy little town that had gone so far as to change its name to Dish in order to get a deal with a satellite TV provider (no joke).
But then the problems started to creep in… or rather seep up through the ground. The air took on an acrid smell, the water was flammable, and people started getting unexplained nosebleeds. Tillman moved his family away after his son suffered a nosebleed that hospitalized him.
Ahh, companies… they don’t have to care about anything anymore. Good old deregulation. Conservatism you can smell.
I agree completely. The statist capitalist system has got to go. We need to remove the toxic waste of capitalism and bring really free markets and power to the people and the workers. We need to abolish hierarchies and the state and the fraudulent capitalist system of "private property" that goes along with them.
ReplyDeleteNaturally, I'm also sure you don't mean to imply that when the government does something, it always goes right and nothing bad happens.
How can anyone be right all the time?
ReplyDeleteI just see there being a need for outside regulation because self-regulation is no regulation. The costs of the inevitable errors in regulation are far less than the cost of no regulation at all, and there is always the opportunity to change a bad regulation, but it doesn't help anyone but dirty businesss to spread the lie that no regulation is good regulation.
I would go so far as to say I think we can get natural gas out of the ground safely, and I would like to see it happen, but I also hate that there is money being diverted to natural gas tainting our nation's small towns from bills that are meant to support real alternative energies (which I would consider sustainable and clean, and gas is finite and filthy).
No, you do make some good points, Bret. I don't really disagree, but there is more than one way to insure that companies behave themselves.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem everyone has is confirmation bias, and we see only what we want to see. My point on government is only that it has no better track record (and isn't really any more accountable; I mean really, is the will of the people being taken into consideration on things like the debt ceiling or our multiple foreign wars) than private companies.
gas is finite and filthy
Yes, but we have a lot of it, so we should take advantage of it, as well as coal and oil, while still developing alternative sources of energy.
I would love to read some of these methods of non-government, non-force wielding methods of preventing abuse of corporate power.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't matter if we have a lot of gas now, we don't have an unlimited amount. There needs to be a real push to advance research on power sources which are renewable or sustainable or whatever you want to call it the concept of not just burning a finite resource until we run out. It's frustrating when government money is just going towards the next speculative method of polluting the land.
But you know, when the biggest contributor to a large number of Democrats is the energy industry, we can expect their legislation to reflect that and funnel billions of our dollars towards people who are already billionaires from poisoning us.