In December 2009, insurance giant Swiss Re released a paper focussed on arguments made by climate change “skeptics”, interested readers can find it here.
I thought some of you might be interested.
[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqBURjOdOG8:550:0]
h/t Michael Tobis: http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/07/climate-change-and-national-security.html
I kinda liked this, so I’ve cribbed it from an earlier post, where it served as prologue and summary to recent comments by Sen. Al Franken about the conservative worship of corporations.
I refer to my earlier posts on (1) corporate “free speech”, campaign contributions and the recent Citizens United decision, and (2) grants by states of corporate status, especially so-called “limited liability” (zero liability, in fact) to shareholders. The latter has fuelled the growth of powerful corporations and of the growth of a powerful central federal government that purports to rein them in, and has led not only the predominance of corporations and the state, but to rampant manipulation, corruption, moral hazard and mismanagement on a scale that, on the heels of massive bailouts to our elites in the financial sector, now with BP’s so far unstoppable Gulf gusher, appears to have taken on Biblical proportions.
Quite obviously, the government cannot effectively manage common resources, but has itself – by unleashing limited liability machines that owe duties only to a weak shareholder class, and by disenfranchising fishermen and others who depend on such resources – encouraged the destruction of such resources and of local, vital communities of mutually responsible individuals. Our inept, grasping and feckless Government itself is not simply a massive “tragedy of the commons”, but the vehicle for massive Avatar-style theft.
If libertarians truly love freedom, it is time for them to start thinking about the frequently negative role that large corporations play, and to start voicing criticisms and suggesting effective ways to check abuses and to re-empower local communities.
Or have libertarians, like Lew Rockwell, already exhausted up their ration of moral opprobrium, outrage and good ideas in condemning those stupid mankind-hating enviro-fascists who are fighting a losing battle with corporations and elites over the wheel of government?
I ran into a blog post by biologist PZ Myers, consisting mainly of a cartoon presenting a “taxonomy” lampooning “libertarians“. Some of the funning might hit close to home, but it is apparent that libertarians are more than a little misunerstood.
I left the following comment, and am cross-posting here because I fear the number of links may trigger a spam filter:
PZ, what’s a libertarian? One might say they are are guys like Glenn Greenwald, not always self-identified as libertarian but fighting to keep both so-called “conservatives” and “liberals” honest.
But they are still an inconsistent bunch – as the range of caricatures illustrates but fails to wholly capture – and are as prone to stereotyping and tribal perceptions/reactions as you and others here are.
I now consider myself libertarian, but have been butting heads with libertarians (and conservatives/liberals) for years, particularly over environmental issues and the negative roles played by corporations and government.
Here’s a taste of what is still libertarian, but rather rare:
Maybe that’s too much of a taste for most of you, but since there is some obvious curiosity I thought I offer an introduction.
Sincerely, TT
Posted by: TokyoTomSr | June 30, 2010 3:09 AM
A libertarian analysis of the corporate form, particularly the state grant of limited liability to shareholders, does not begin and end with the question of whether such a government intervention has any libertarian justification (it clearly does not), or even – as Stephan Kinsella continually suggests – with the narrow question of whether, in hie case of a particular “corporate tort,” it is fair to impose liability broadly on shareholders who had no personal role in a tort. Rather, as I have have long argued in my posts on limited liability, one must also examine the systemic consequences of the grant.
It is my own humble view that limited liability of shareholders, when combined with other corporate attributes like unlimited life and purposes and an ability to further ring-fence risky activities in separate subsidiary entities, has had profound and pervasive consequences: relative anonymity of ownership, remoteness of owners from communities in which the firms operate, an explosion of powerful firms and wealthy investors and their ability to influence judges, legislators, bureaucrats, the press and mass media, and a steady erosion of common law and growth in the centralized regulatory state – as citizens fight to limit the risks and costs that corporations impose on individuals and communities. The growth of corporations is accompanied by growing moral hazard, not simply because dividends paid to an anonymous and morally blind shareholder class cannot be clawed back when risks are materialized, but shareholders find it increasingly difficult to rein in a self-interested class of executives and employees.
The toxic combination of statism and limited-liability moral hazard -and the steady shifting of risks to society that both entail – can be clearly seen in both the BP Gulf oil disaster (see my BP posts) and in the financial crisis.
I recently ran across a post by an informed observer of the financial crisis that pointed to these problems; The Ten Trillion Dollar Black Swan in the January 26, 2009 online edition of American Thinker by Mike Razar, who describes himself as a “Phd in math from Harvard, a math professor, independent option floor trader, sr. vp swiss bank corp, 9 years on board of directors of the CBOE (options exchange), chairman of product development cmte., financial software development”; some excerpts follow (emphasis added):
|
Posted by: bob bradley <!–
–><!– Comment: #33 –> Jan 26, 06:43 PM
|
|||
Razar refers implicitly to successful lobbying by the investment banks to expand their permissible leverage, but fails to note that the moral hazard was further enabled by government bailouts. This combination of corporate risk shifting and rampant, government-fuelled moral hazard is also present in the case of the BP disaster.
Would we have healthier offshore oil and gas development and oversight if government did not license and pretend to regulate it, but rather those whose livelihoods are put at risk by spills? And if those engaged in it did not act through corporations, but partnerships with unlimited liability and without liability caps and royalty incentives set by government?
We obviously need real frankness and anger, but incentives of Congresscritters and lawsuit defendants lead us into confused farces:
[View:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/tony-hayward-testimony-video_n_616690.html:550:0]
More here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/tony-hayward-testimony-video_n_616690.html
“The first thing to do is to underestimate the problem ….”
“Regulations? I never heard of it either, but keep bloody looking.”
Satire on the Oil Spill at the Australian Broadcasting Corp. by Clarke and Dawe
Transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2917782.htm
Well of course the lifting of the blockade was only partial, but I still found the following Hitler parody video (I noted this interesting genre earlier) both rather prescient and notable because of its unusual slant, placing Hitler as a parody spokesman for Israel:
[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzUDLF7L22U:550:0]
This looks like just another parody that someone posted two weeks ago, and only has 900 viewers or so.
In a similar vein, there was a Hitler parody up that complained about the unavailability of parking in Tel Aviv; due to complaints YouTube took the English sub-titled version down (and cited a copyright violation complaint), but the Hebrew version remains up. A brief discussion of the parodies – and a copy of one in which Hitler despairs at being mocked by the parodies – is here. Apparently videos that have been removed for copyright reasons are backed up at www.youtomb.com.
There is a duelling parody that gained much more prominence than the one above; an editor from the Jerusalem Post arranged “We Con the World” – a full-blown parody of “We Are the World” that mocks the flotilla and gained attention after it was sent by members of the Israeli government press office to journalists; the government has since apologized. It was removed by YouTube, but is available here.
1. The Wall Street Journal published an interesting piece on May 27 by Elizabeth Williamson on BP’s pro-drilling/damage control lobbying: BP Aims to Avoid Fresh Restrictions on Drilling, but it seemed to me that it too quickly skated past the eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration, which undeniably had an impact on our regulatory structure and ethos.
Curious, I queried the reporter, and we had the following exchange:
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tom
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Hi Tom, Thanks for writing. Cheney’s secret meeting–is there another one scheduled? Or you don’t think there’s enough to cover in the current presidency?
Elizabeth Williamson
Reporter
The Wall Street Journal
202 862 6667
Cell: 202 674 2463
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
Surely you’re not uninterested energy policy prior to Obama? That would be like a financial reporter now being uninterested in figuring out why there was a bubble, what went wrong with financial regulation, why even Goldman Sachs needed a bailout, simply because it happened before Obama.
Does superficiality really rule, and is the WSJ simply uninterested in how one White House completely blocked out the press and public from a serious of meetings on energy/climate policy? Say it ain’t so, Elizabeth.
Tom
2. Not much came of that, besides a few idle suspicions that the Wall Street Journal’s reporting might and lack thereof might reflect a political and/or statist agenda of one sort or another. But idle speculation not being my purpose, I noted recently some coverage of the secret Cheney meetings (so secret that the Bush adminstration went to all the way to the Supreme Court) to protect the “Executive Privilege” to hide imoprtant activities from the American people) that I thought I would bring you readers’ attnetion.
I encourage people to take a look at Kate Sheppard’s June 10 article at Mother Jones, Dick Cheney’s Last Laugh; The Deepwater Horizon disaster raises new questions about the Bush administration’s secret energy task force. It looks like the secret task force had a direct impact in regulatroy and legislative actions that affected, among others, approval procedures for offshore drilling activities. But much remains unknown:
Open government advocates say this might be the appropriate time to push for more information about his task force. Mandy Smithberger, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, says that it’s “definitely a ripe time” to find out more about what went on in the meetings. “I don’t think you can understand how we got to where we are without looking back,” she says.
“When you have a disaster of this magnitude, it raises the question, if in this whole secretive process, what was discussed, how much did the Bush administration ignore, how much did they allow the oil and gas industry to basically do what they wanted,” says AnneWeismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. “Secrecy is so pernicious that it can continue to damage even when the administration is not in power.”
Is it too much to ask to have a little more light of Austrian analysis thrown on BP? I’ve asked Lew Rockwell and Stephan Kinsella not simply about the moral calculus that leads them to assert that BP is the biggest victim of its own decisions that produced the Gulf oil gusher, but also whether it makes sense to speak of a massive corporation as if it is in any way a “person” similar to those living breathing individuals its action have harmed and continue to harm.
Where, in a week when BP CEO Tony Hayward (after Senator Joe Barton first apologizes to him for a “shakedown” of BP by President Obama) is off watching a yacht race, is the focus of Austrians on real people – and how the state-given corporate entity status affects human behavior WITHIN the corporation, as well as the behavior of the “corporation” to others? Maybe the issues raised are just too insignificant or mundane? But hey, as Stephan has just noted to me in a dull, cursory comment:
“what do you expect us to say? this is just a tort. Torts happen”!
Confused nonsense, I say. “Torts “happen”? Balderdash – PEOPLE violate the rights of others (commit torts). Did this tort “happen” to our chief victim, BP, too?
It is one of the salient features of corporations that they confuse themselves and everyone else as to WHO, precisely, is responsible for their actions and the harms they cause others, and it is time for Austrians to examine such features closely.
All of this is prelude to the following by Jim Hightower that highlights the behavior of BP and its CEO:
Jim Hightower, BP Is a Corporate Criminal; BP has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety records in the industry. (AlterNet, June 17):
Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you’re a strutting peacock — the next day, you’re just another gasping, oil-covered bird.
In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for “Beyond Petroleum.”
Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.
From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.
And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant’s current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.
While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could’ve foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control. Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what’s delicately called a major “petroleum release” in the Gulf of Mexico.
“What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you’re not the victim here — and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP’s reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.
“It wasn’t our accident,” the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an “accident,” but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP’s executive suite.
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP’s mess was fast becoming America’s worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well “is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.
Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would’ve been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, “Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.” (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly “Hightower Lowdown,” co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
These observations are similar to those of Bruce Dixon, who noted:
Ultimately, people woke up, rose up, and revoked those privileges. How long will it be before we revoke the lawless privileges of corporations, before we limit their immunity, curtail their immortality, and rein in their immorality?. How long can we, and the planet on which we depend for life itself, wait? Is there every a line that cannot be crossed? Where is it? What will it take?When it suits their purposes, employees and mouthpieces of various transnational firms hasten to assure us that “corporations are people too.” In a sense this is certainly true. Despite what some bible thumping fundamentalists will tell you, corporations were not ordained by the Almighty. Corporations are legal fictions. They are artificial shields under which we agree to allow a handful of extremely wealthy people to rule over the rest us, and plunder the planet and its people at will, just as centuries ago most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born, the “people of quality” had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.
The gaps between (i) Austrian insistence that we focus on individual rights and plan formation, (ii) the penchant of some (many!) libertarians to support corporations while bashing citizens groups which are unhappy with the impacts of corporate actions on others, and (iii) the real world where corporate misbehavior is large and spinning out of control (in banking as well as in the Gulf and elsewhere where governments ”protect” their citizens by turning community resources into a government commons, are growing and cannot be ignored.
One must ask – does it make any difference, either to the broader statist environment that we find ourselves, or to the behavior of BP, that BP is a corporation that is granted unlimited life and whose shareholders are excluded from any personal liability for corporate acts? I think that it undeniably matters, and quite deeply.
Just as libertarian and other commentators have suggested that we need to insist that firms that engage in the banking business be partnerships with unlimited liability in order to control the moral hazard engendered by the current system, so too should libertarians insist on restoring personal responsibility and ending both corporate limited liability and the government management of commons. If we do so, we will certainly see much greater efforts by those who own and/or manage business enterprises to control risks and behave responsibly – which will take pressure off of spiralling calls for corrupt and inept governments to “do something!”
Recent Comments