“A Threat To Human Existence”: Perils Of Warming Planet Are Ignored By GOP Hopefuls
Amazingly, tellingly, the last Republican debate included not a single question about one of the most ambitious international agreements in civilized history — the recently concluded Paris accord on climate change. Signed by nearly 200 countries, including the United States, the agreement attempts to moderate a threat to human existence: the warming of the planet.
But there was barely a mention of climate change on that debate stage. Not only didn’t the moderators consider it worthy of a question, but neither did the candidates believe it important enough for sustained comment. Global warming came up only in a couple of asides intended as criticisms of President Obama’s agenda.
The debate was about national security, you say? Well, they contrasted a promised muscular approach to what they described as the weakness of the president, who is too cowardly or politically correct, in their telling, to even use the right words to describe Islamic jihadists.
Yet, the Pentagon has concluded that climate change represents “immediate risks” to national security. Last year, the nation’s military leaders issued a report — “2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” — that says that global warming will “affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the nation.”
Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was widely derided after a November Democratic debate in which he said that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.” No military analyst or climate scientist has gone so far as to draw a straight line between global warming and the savagery of ISIS.
However, the Pentagon’s report does make clear that climate change will lead to greater instability worldwide: droughts, food shortages, mass migrations, failed states. And those are just the sorts of conditions that breed terrorists.
According to the Department of Defense, the U.S. armed forces will also find their resources strained at home as their troops are likely to be called upon more often for civilian assistance in the wake of natural disasters. There will be more extreme events — more violent storms, more fires, more flooding. And as if that were not enough, some of the military’s combat activities will be compromised; amphibious landings, for example, are likely to be more challenging because of rising oceans, according to the report.
Not that you’d know any of that from listening to the GOP candidates. Most leading Republicans are loath even to acknowledge that climate change is occurring — much less acknowledge that it has any connection to national security. Earlier this month, in fact, presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who heads the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, declared at a hearing on climate change that “for the past 18 years … there has been no significant warming whatsoever.”
Au contraire. According to scientists at NASA and the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, 2014 was the warmest year since records were first kept in 1880. “The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record,” NASA said, “with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000.”
The refusal of the modern Republican Party to come to terms with climate change leaves it as the only major political party that doubts the science, the only modern body of flat-Earthers. Conservatives in Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Israel and everywhere else in the democratic world have accepted the scientific consensus.
So, for that matter, has ExxonMobil, which spent decades trying to muddy the waters around climate research. The oil giant may have been forced to acknowledge the facts by increasing legal and economic pressures, but it finally stated the obvious: “We believe the risks of climate change are real, and those risks warrant constructive action by both policymakers and the business community,” ExxonMobil Vice President Ken Cohen said recently. Other major oil companies have also embraced the scientific consensus.
It’s strange that Republicans are peddling fear at every turn, but they refuse to acknowledge an existential threat. Islamic jihadists are troubling, but they don’t come close to the peril represented by a warming planet.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, December 19, 2015
“For The Love Of Money”: How The Gas Lobby Is Using The Crimea Crisis To Push Bad Policy And Make More Money
A small group of pundits and politicians with close ties to the fossil fuel industry are using the crisis in Crimea to demand that the United States promote natural gas exports as a quick fix for the volatile situation. But such a solution, experts say, would cost billions of dollars, require years of development, and would not significantly impact the international price of gas or Russia’s role as a major supplier for the region. Rather, the move would simply increase gas prices for American consumers while enriching companies involved in the liquified natural gas (LNG) trade.
On Capitol Hill, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Representative Fred Upton (R-MI) was among the first to use the crisis in Ukraine to demand that the Department of Energy speed up the approval process for new LNG terminals. “Now is the time to send the signal to our global allies that US natural gas will be an available and viable alternative to their energy needs,” said Upton in a statement. As we’ve reported, Upton’s committee is managed in part by Tom Hassenboehler, a former lobbyist who joined Upton’s staff last year after working for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, the primary trade group pushing to expand natural gas development and LNG exports.
Paul Bledsoe, in an opinion column for Reuters, wrote that the United States should expedite natural gas exports to “bolster transatlantic solidarity and help to form a united US-EU response to Russian intervention in Crimea.” He was identified in the piece as a member of the “White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton.” What wasn’t disclosed, however, is that Bledsoe is an official with a pro–fossil fuels think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center, which is funded by the American Gas Association and energy companies with a financial stake in promoting the natural gas industry. (Although he’s not listed on the website, a representative with BPC told Republic Report that Bledsoe continues to work there.)
Groups created and funded by Charles Koch, chief executive of Koch Industries, have also demanded that America should respond to the crisis in Crimea with LNG exports. “A serious President would also fast-forward permits on new liquefied natural gas terminals that could ship to Europe,” claims a column posted by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-run advocacy group. A similar argument is advanced by the Koch-founded Cato Institute.
What’s left undisclosed, however, is the huge financial stake in the debate for Koch Industries. A brochure for the company shows that Koch has deeply expanded its footprint into the natural gas market, and is now actively engaged in shipping, sourcing and marketing LNG, in addition to becoming a leader in developing financial instruments related to natural gas. “To complement existing North American activities from Houston and to optimize their global portfolio, KS&T companies are expanding a Europe-wide natural gas business from Geneva and an LNG trading business from offices in Houston and London,” reads the document. Further, Koch federal lobbying disclosures show that the firm has pushed a bill to expedite LNG exports from America to NATO countries.
In perhaps the most ironic twist of this public debate around how to respond to Russia’s incursion into Crimea, American lobbyists with ties to Russia are calling for a solution that would not only shield Russian gas oligarchs, but enrich them. The National Association of Manufacturers has opposed tough sanctions on Russia. Instead, NAM has used the crisis in Ukraine to “urge speedier approval of liquified natural gas exports, arguing that the move would weaken Vladimir Putin’s control over Europe’s energy supply.” NAM’s chief lobbyist Jay Timmons told Politico that an LNG-export response would “send a strong signal to the Russian Federation, our NATO allies, our trading partners and the rest of the world that energy exports matter and are a critical tool of American foreign policy.”
What Timmons did not mention is that ExxonMobil is a leading member of his trade association, and that ExxonMobil has extensive ties to Russian gas giants, including partnerships to develop natural gas in the United States and around the world. (For more on the business ties, see Kert Davies and Steve Horn’s recent reporting on the Putin-sanctioned alliance between ExxonMobil and Russian state–owned oil and gas giant Rosneft.) In short, Timmons’s strong signal to Russia would help Russian gas businesses.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, March 20, 2014; Originally Published at RepublicReport.org
“A Breed Apart”: So This Is What “Individual Liberty” Looks Like
I was minding my own business channel surfing when I stumbled upon a disturbing scene carried on (where else?) Fox News. More than 1,500 students from all over the world were gathered in Washington to attend what was billed as the Students for Liberty Conference, whose advertised aim was to “celebrate freedom.”
The part I saw had Fox Business host John Stossel, author of No They Can’t: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed, moderating a panel in which he asked students this bit of political trivia: How often is the word “democracy” used in the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence for that matter?
What came next was chilling. When students were given the correct answer – none – they cheered.
Stossel later explained why. These students, like the Founding Fathers, “understood that democracy may bring mob rule – tyranny of a majority. So the Constitution focuses on restricting government – to secure individual liberty.”
Thanks go to Chris Hayes of MSNBC for showing what this so called “individual liberty” sometimes looks like in real life.
Hayes profiled ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. As the head of the largest natural gas producer in the US, Tillerson is a vocal proponent of a controversial process known as hydraulic fracking.
It is so controversial, in fact, that many municipalities have begun passing local ordinances to place a moratorium on the practice until more is known about its long-term consequences. Exxon, for its part, has been just as active suing these cities and towns to have the ordinances overturned.
Then along comes another gas company with plans to construct one of these water towers needed for fracking — but this one near Exxon Rex’s 83-acre, $5 million horse ranch near Bartonville, Texas. Tillerson, of course, welcomes the new gas company to the neighborhood with open arms. Right?
Not on your life. Instead, Tillerson and his super-wealthy neighbors file a lawsuit which states that the fracking tower must be stopped since it might “devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy.”
Further, as the Wall Street Journal disapprovingly reports, Tillerson and his neighbors filed suit, claiming that what the gas company wanted to do was illegal since it would create “a noise nuisance and traffic hazards” due to the heavy trucks hauling and pumping the massive amounts of water needed to unlock oil and gas from dense rock.
As Hayes succinctly put it: “Rex Tillerson is leading the fracking revolution — just not in his backyard.”
Adds Rich Unger writing in Forbes: “Sometimes, the hypocrisy expressed in real life is so sublimely rich that one could never hope to construct a similar scenario out of pure imagination.”
Being a vocal advocate for fracking is “a key and critical function” of Mr. Tillerson’s day job, says Unger. It is all he can do when he wakes up in the morning to “protect and nurture the process of hydraulic fracturing so that his company can continue to rack in billions via the production and sale of natural gas.”
So committed is Rex to the process of fracking, says Unger, “that he has loudly lashed out at those who criticize and seek to regulate hydraulic fracturing, suggesting that such efforts are a very bad idea, indeed.”
Except when the fracking is in Tillerson’s backyard.
The odium directed at Tillerson practically writes itself. But critics are wrong to call him a hypocrite. A hypocrite is someone who subscribes to the notion that people are basically equal, who agrees that rules should apply equally to everyone, but who nonetheless insists on special privileges or exemptions for themselves.
Tillerson, and those of his kind throughout history, do not subscribe to such egalitarian — dare we say democratic — ideals as justice or fairness. They really do believe their wealth makes them a breed apart. And they really do think that rules which apply to everyone else do not apply to them, though they rarely admit that in public.
To Tillerson and his caste, double standards are the only ones worth having. Consequently, it is perfectly legitimate, in their view, to make billions of dollars supporting a fracking process they say is a danger to no one — except people who own multi-million horse ranches in rural Texas.
I wonder if Stossel’s Students for Liberty cheered just as loudly once they learned the Constitution does not use the world oligarchy either?
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 27, 2014
Why The GOP’s ‘Job Creators’ Are Hard to Find
If you’re a “job creator,” raise your hand. It would be nice to know who you are, exactly.
Republicans negotiating with President Obama over a fix for the nation’s debt problems have been rolling out the heavy buzzwords lately, and there must have been a fresh memo about the sonorous ring of “job creators.” House Speaker John Boehner repeatedly decries tax hikes on job creators, with congressional colleagues such as Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling forming a job-creators chorus behind him. House Republicans recently published a “Plan for America’s Job Creators” (but not for everybody else, presumably) and if you’re an aggrieved job creator, you can let House Majority Leader Eric Cantor know what’s bugging you by filling out a brief form at http://jobs.majorityleader.gov/.
The trouble is, job creators are an endangered species these days. The biggest problem in the U.S. economy, in fact, is a shortage of job creators to reward and protect. Companies are barely hiring, and there are about 7 million fewer jobs now than there were at the end of 2007, when the Great Recession began. Part of the Republicans’ plan is to lower taxes, streamline regulation, open more trade and take other steps that will stimulate job creation. But we’ve already tried some of that, including several rounds of tax cuts since 2008. Most job creators are still hiding.
Big companies employ a lot of Americans, but over the last few years they’ve been better at job destruction than job creation. Between 2007 and 2010, companies with more than 1,000 employees shed about 2.6 million jobs, according to the latest data from the Labor Department. Many big companies have rebounded sharply from the recession, with impressive profits and a lot of cash on hand. But even some of the most successful big companies aren’t doing much job creation–not in the United States, anyway. Here are a few examples:
General Electric, which is run by the same Jeffrey Immelt who chairs President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, axed 32,000 jobs worldwide between 2007 and 2010, according to information from GE’s annual reports. About 22,000 of those lost jobs were in the United States. No job creation there, even though GE earned about $12 billion in profits in 2010.
Exxon Mobil has added about 2,800 jobs worldwide since 2007, but the giant oil firm doesn’t break out how many of those new hires work in the United States. Since Exxon earns nearly 70 percent of its revenue from overseas, it’s a good bet that’s where most of the new jobs are, too.
Wal-Mart has added about 40,000 jobs in the United States since 2007, largely because the discount retailer has been a beneficiary of pinched consumers desperate to save money. But it has added about 150,000 jobs overseas during the same time–nearly four times the U.S. tally. Still, Wal-Mart seems to be one company that can legitimately call itself a job creator.
IBM has added about 40,000 employees since 2007, but like Exxon, it doesn’t say where. About 65 percent of IBM’s revenue comes from abroad, and that’s where almost all of its revenue growth has come from since 2007. IBM’s U.S. business is actually down from 2007 levels, so it’s possible that most or all of IBM’s new hires have been overseas.
Big companies, in fact, aren’t considered a big source of new jobs. While they generate a lot of profits, they also tend to be mature enterprises more likely to swallow other companies and consolidate market share, which tends to eliminate jobs, not create them. “It’s the job of big firms to shed jobs,” says Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffmann Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. “Big firms want to lower costs, which means lowering labor costs.”
Young firms, Schramm says, account for virtually all net job creation in the U.S. economy over the last 30 years. That’s because startups that survive their first couple of years tend to be vibrant, fast-growing companies that create new industries and hire a lot of new workers. Think Microsoft and Oracle in the 1980s, and Amazon, eBay, and Google in the 1990s. Today, new technology-based firms like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, and LinkedIn represent one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy. However, they’re the last companies that need any kind of tax relief–and they’re not about to ask for special treatment from Washington, either. They became transformative companies without Washington’s help, and they’d like to keep it that way.
Politicians routinely extol the virtues of “small business,” but that’s not really where the job creators are, either. Conventional small businesses–dry cleaners, nail salons, delicatessens, independent professionals like lawyers and doctors–tend to be important pillars of their communities, but they also come and go without generating a lot of new jobs, on balance. During the third quarter of 2010 (the most recent quarter for which there’s data), firms with fewer than 20 employees eliminated 34,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department. The biggest gains were among firms with 500 to 999 employees, which created 37,000 jobs.
So if Republicans want to modify the tax code to reward and encourage job creators, they need to come up with a scheme that offers the lowest tax rates to fast-growing startups, some medium-sized firms, and a few select multinationals. Of course, they might prefer to lower taxes on everybody who could be a job creator–because that includes almost everybody. If you ever spend money, that makes you a job creator, in the most expansive sense of the phrase, since somebody gets paid to provide whatever you buy. But then we’d have to figure out whether to reward American consumers for helping create jobs in China, Japan, Sri Lanka, or wherever the imported goods they purchase come from, or to reward people who spend money that helps create American jobs. So if you buy a Lexus made in Japan or Gucci loafers made in Italy, you’re not really a creator of American jobs and you shouldn’t be eligible for favorable tax treatement. But if you have your kitchen remodeled by a local contractor or go to a chiropractor for back pain, you qualify. It’s not so easy being a job creator. Or locating one.
By: Rick Newman, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
To Fix The Budget Deficit, Raise Corporate Taxes
Washington is a town currently gripped by deficit hysteria. Various commissions and congressional “gangs” have formed (and broken up) with the goal of crafting a plan to bring the nation’s budget into balance. Even the media has been sucked into this vortex, dedicating far more of its time to covering the deficit than other economic issues, such as unemployment.
At the same time, both parties seem to agree that the nation’s corporate tax code needs to be reformed. President Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan each dedicated a portion of their respective budget plans to overhauling the federal corporate income tax, which is high on paper, but so riddled with loopholes, deductions, and outright giveaways that few corporations pay the full statutory rate (and several corporations pay no corporate income tax at all).
This, then, should be an excellent opportunity to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone: cleaning up the corporate tax code, lowering the corporate tax rate, and still raising more revenue that can be put towards deficit reduction.
But no.
Despite all the hyperventilating over the deficit, both Republicans and Democrats have said that they want corporate tax reform to be revenue neutral, meaning no more or less revenue will be raised by the new system than was raised by the old. President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have each extolled the virtues of deficit-neutral corporate tax reform. But if this is actually the road that’s taken, it will constitute a colossal missed opportunity.
At the moment, corporate tax revenue has plunged to historic lows. In 1960, the corporate income tax provided more than 23 percent of federal revenue; the Office of Management and Budget estimates that it will provide less than 10 percent this year.
During the 1960s, the United States consistently raised nearly 4 percent of GDP in corporate revenue. During the 1970s, the total was still above 2.5 percent of GDP. Now, the U.S. raises less than 1.5 percent of GDP from the corporate income tax. As the Congressional Research Service put it, “Despite concerns expressed about the size of the corporate tax rate, current corporate taxes are extremely low by historical standards.”
The United States effective corporate tax rate is also low by international standards (though the 35 percent statutory rate is the second highest in the world). There are plenty of reasons for this drop, but chief among them is the proliferation of loopholes and credits clogging up the corporate tax code (alongside the growing use of offshore tax havens and the ability of corporations to defer taxes on offshore profits indefinitely).
Huge corporations, such as ExxonMobil, have recently had years where they paid literally nothing to the U.S. Treasury, despite making huge profits. The New York Times made waves by finding that General Electric paid no federal income tax last year, instead pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits. Mega-manufacturer Boeing has done the same, paying no federal taxes in 2009 while collecting $132 million in tax benefits. Google last year had a 2.4 percent effective tax rate, while California-based Broadcom’s rate was just 1.4 percent, far below the rate that the average American pays.
The Treasury Department estimated in 2007 that corporate tax preferences cost $1.2 trillion in lost revenue over a decade. So there is ample room to remove credits and deductions (like those that benefit, amongst others, hugely profitable oil companies and agribusinesses), lower the statutory rate, while still bringing in more revenue. Some companies would see their taxes go up, but others would see their tax bills drop, and the corporate tax code would be more fair, efficient, and competitive, while ensuring that all corporations pay their fair share.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, “corporate tax reform is a solid candidate to make a contribution to fiscal improvement … Taking a major revenue source off the table for deficit reduction at the outset would be ill-advised.” Indeed, with corporate profits skyrocketing—up 81 percent over a year ago—and corporations sitting on trillions in cash reserves, there is no reason that corporate tax reform should be done in a way that is deficit neutral, besides the fact that raising more revenue will be politically difficult, as corporations will likely throw their considerable lobbying weight against such a move. But in the end, failing to raise additional corporate tax revenue will simply shift more of the deficit reduction burden onto a middle-class already battered by the Great Recession.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, May 25, 2011
Share This Blog
mykeystrokes.com- “The Unrelenting Hostility Of Washington’s Courtier Press”: The Media’s Crusade Of Scandals Against Hillary Clinton July 28, 2016
- “Endorsing This Philistine”: The Christian Right Has Surrendered To Trump July 24, 2016
- “Cop Killers Serve No Cause”: It’s Getting To The Point Where No Lives Matter July 24, 2016
mykeystrokes.com 