Government, in the view of
the AEIC, needs to work in financial and strategic concert with
industry. The report reiterates a
previous call by the AEIC to increase and sustain public investment in
the alternative energy industry. Their plan includes the formation of a
national board for energy strategy, national technology centers, new
energy agencies, a prototyping and piloting program, and new energy usage
fees.
Bank of America was, again,
despite assurances of their fiscal health,
just last month on the verge of bankruptcy. Yet they’re among those
advising Americans on the road to economic success as if they have the
kind of business sense required for realizing broad, sustainable
transformations within our country.
Throughout the history of the United States, the [sic] federal government
has played a central role in catalyzing and driving innovation and
technology development in a variety of strategic areas — defense, health,
agriculture, and information technology, to name a few — and it has often
done so with strong results.
The AEIC would have
alternative energy brought into the fold of the
military-industrial-media-etcetera complex. Environmentalists should see
the danger this poses to their cause and proposed solutions as it would set up
alternative energy to be the next economic bubble. Capitalists should see
the danger this poses to further discrediting capitalism. Cognizant,
conscientious
citizens should see the danger this poses to the nation’s already
grossly disparate concentration of wealth, social mobility,
justice, and stability.
Where will the tax base be
for municipalities to fund alternative energy upgrades? Where will people
get the money to outfit their McMansion with solar panels while
already delinquent on their mortgage?
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, a
contributor in the AEIC vision, states the following:
No matter
how well intentioned, utility companies and other private investors simply
are not going to invest deeply in the kind of R&D needed to create
scalable, low-cost, low-carbon energy innovations They have little or no
economic incentive to do so. This is a unique but critical role for
government, one central to our long-term economic competitiveness.
It’s deceptively true, incentive is
lacking; but, the fascism called for by the AEIC isn’t the
solution. This isn’t hyperbole or rhetoric, it’s the correct descriptor.
It’s not capitalism (private ownership of goods and means), socialism
(privately owned goods produced by the state), or communism (everything
owned by the state); it is fascism. Don’t conflate the AEIC's suggested
partnership of business and government with anything other than
fascism: both goods and the means of production privately owned albeit
directed and controlled by the state.
As vows have already been
exchanged in this marriage between corporations and the state, AEIC member
and General Electric Chairman & CEO, Jeff Immelt, simultaneously chairs
Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Of course, trans-national
corporatists, already in control of half the nation’s capital, have no
qualms about posing as bold “capitalists” when their own money isn’t at
risk, profits remain private, and loss compensation is extracted from the
American taxpayer. Unsurprisingly, they think the funds to fuel the green
bubble ought to come from the Government, even though it’s already
arguably between $14.7
to
211 trillion in debt. They don’t care if their ventures fail because
they will, at worst, walk away with multi-million dollar severance
packages while growing numbers of the American people
take up dumpster diving to make ends meet.
Systemic and widespread
changes toward alternative
energies would assuredly be a great benefit to America. However, subsidizing and nurturing
alternative energies, while retaining subsidies and/or tax breaks for
fossil fuels, is asinine. As it is, we currently pay more per ounce for
Coca Cola® soft drinks than we do oil thanks to preferential treatment.
As long as the net value of fossil fuels is so heavily distorted,
alternatives will not make meaningful headway beyond creating the illusion
of progress toward alternatives and energy independence.
Truthfully, absent
government-established preferential status and factoring in often
disassociated costs (e.g., repeated foreign resource wars, climate change
impacts, health hazards via pollution), a gallon of gas would properly run
multiples above its current price per gallon. Under those real free-market
conditions, making public investments, subsidizing alternatives, and
establishing government energy “hubs” would be plainly unnecessary; they
would easily out-compete fossil fuels and people would be clamoring for
the renewable options. The Libyan conquest, with eyes open, has to be yet
another glaring reminder that foreign policy is still entirely out of line
with the green agenda. Resource allocation of all
kinds is in all the wrong places.
Of course the “free market”
is failing to deliver from the AEIC market perspective; it isn't the
market structure that corporatists rely upon or desire. The reality is
that the market is captive, it is heavily manipulated, and
it is based around credit. Rather than entrenchment, Solyndra’s failure
should absolutely provoke a sincere examination (Republican-leaning
critics may be rightly critical for the wrong reasons while disregarding
their own culpability) of all the aspects of that failure.
Why did they go under? Why
weren’t they able to compete with Chinese solar manufacturers? Questions
such as these should lead to, for instance, much-needed consideration of
the
deleterious effects of our trade policies oriented toward unfettered
access to U.S. markets. These questions, unsurprisingly, are not sincerely
addressed by General Electric; they're sending thousands of jobs making
light bulbs and
X-ray machines to China.
Will Federal Government
investment miraculously work despite current trade policy, when
smaller-scale experiments are giving us evidence to the contrary? It is
doubtful, taking history as the evidentiary basis, that an American
alternative energy industry will flourish as Washington is on course for
even more free trade agreements, and correspondingly, still further
dissociation between domestic incomes and consumption of foreign products.
Solyndra went under with
comparatively few domestic competitors. In fact, the once very promising
and publicly traded Evergreen Solar, trying to survive without
Government-guaranteed loans,
also moved toward bankruptcy in August. Alternative energy companies,
in general and irrespective of levels of Government support, are having
much difficulty if not failing outright in the U.S.
Technically sound,
innovative, well managed, alternative energy businesses face the basic challenge
of getting loans; good ideas and potential products are languishing even
though the U.S. Government has already, repeatedly flooded (world)
markets with tens of trillions of dollars, via
troubled asset relief,
quantitative easing,
temporary liquidity guarantees, and other financial schemes, that seemingly
evaporate. How can that be? Where’s the trickle down?
Wall Street financial
institutions are among those that soaked up the dollar flood, using it to
put lipstick on their abhorrent balance sheets and pay out exorbitant
bonuses, as lending locked up for main street America, good and bad
borrowers alike. We have witnessed and continue to experience the
offerings of corruption and corporatism. Moreover, it remains extremely
difficult for individuals and smaller companies to attempt to self finance
when interest rates are effectively zero, punishing savers, and serious
gains on capital can’t even be made.
Washington could, in five
steps, set the conditions for alternative energy to experience genuine,
steady, impressive growth:
Bring the troops home; stop the foreign conquests
and resource wars; invest tax dollars in domestic, not colonial
infrastructure.
Tax American corporations
operating offshore at the onshore rate; force repatriation of foreign
profits.
Withdraw from all
international monetary, financial, and trade institutions; impose tariffs on foreign
goods and services equalizing foreign to domestic manufacturing costs.
Terminate all preferences
set into legal and regulatory structures for fossil fuels; allow a true
free market for sustainable, alternative energy options to fairly
compete.
End the Federal Reserve
System, bring fractional reserve banking to an end, write off all toxic
assets, jail the criminal bankers, and seize and return that which has
been stolen to the American people.
These steps would
set the conditions for the entire American economy to reset and recover.
Doubling
Down on Fascism
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