Rex Tillerson––ExxonMobil––Climate Science Coverup––Houston––Hurricane Harvey

To The United States Senate and House of Representatives:

As we assess the colossal human and infrastructure costs of Harvey, the destructive power and sheer volume of which shocked even the climate scientists who warned this might happen...

…are you planning to investigate and interview Rex Tillerson about ExxonMobil’s decades of coverup on climate science?

As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson was the head of a massive coverup conspiracy…

…possibly the largest and most consequential coverup in human history…

...a deliberate denial of top climate science by Exxon's own scientists that warned of the dangers of carbon driven climate change to which Exxon was a major driving force.

And now Tillerson is the #3 in this administration that has reversed eight years of climate policy…

...apparently to continue the coverup of climate change science…

...and continue maximizing profits in the oil/gas/coal industry, of which Tillerson’s company was the largest company.

I am hoping we don’t see the slackness and indifference we saw at the time of the Iraq War when VP Cheney’s former company, which Cheney had walked to the precipice of bankruptcy, received a huge set of contracts to manage and follow up the war…

…contracts which turned Halliburton from a basket case into a profitable juggernaut––just before its HQ was transferred to a mideast country where its records could be kept secret.

I am sure Mr. Cheney’s extremely deluxe retirement on Chesapeake Bay was enabled by the war decisions he drove through…

...on a war that was a massive and costly failure for the rest of us.

American taxpayers (by which I mean the regular working people who pay the taxes, not the corporations and higher earners who evade them) have been left on the hook for one massive politically driven disaster which was launched for personal financial reasons, the Iraq War. Thousands of our military personnel have died for that war and many thousands more suffered irreparable wounds from it. But Halliburton reaped huge rewards, from which we can assume VP Cheney’s retirement income and properties have flowed.

American taxpayers will cover the cost of hurricane repair in Texas. (Despite Texas’s own congresspeople opposing any such repair in NY and NJ a few years ago, this repair will happen.)

That hurricane has a forensic trail that leads back to climate science from recent decades, and warnings clearly sent, but there are also warnings clearly hidden and silenced by ExxonMobil.

We also have an entire administration built upon the idea that government is a profit opportunity, a president who rails against that kind of corruption while personally engaging in it on a scale we’ve never seen before.

Will you be asking Rex Tillerson the key questions about what Exxon knew and when Exxon knew it?

Will you follow the money?

"Water is Not a Human Right" Sez Corporation

A Nebraska farmer confronts an oil and gas committee, demanding they drink his well water if they think fracking is harmless. Do they? Let's Watch.

You’ve no doubt seen this one. Monsanto lobbyist says their pesticide is safe to drink but refuses to drink it and runs away. (Reported by RawStory)

OK OK… apparently he’s not a paid lobbyist. He’s only a paid shill. Can someone explain the difference? (I wonder why Newsweek decided to parse this one? Did they get a call from a Monsanto lawyer?)

The point is this: Water is not a human right. Nestlé has told us this, so it must be true. People do not have a right to get a drink of water. Water is a corporate right, not a human right. Want to live? Pay the corporation that owns the water.

(Here's the backstory.)

(Here's the film.)

Corporate ownership of water is the future. (From the Guardian.) Wherever possible corporations are finding things people need to live and cornering the market on them.

This has been happening for the past 50 years, bit by bit, ever since Reagan and Thatcher and before that (it's their legacy, their gift to humanity), working its way through corporate-controlled legislatures and being ruled on by corporate-owned judges and supreme courts.

Profiting from Misery, Privation and Disaster

As families huddled to worry about jobs, food and rescuing the family home, Goldman Sachs was gleefully talking about financial crisis as profit opportunity. Who are these people? Are they the type who go through victims' pockets at the scene of an accident? It isn't limited to Goldman, or Wall Street. Many of the vultures lurk in hedge fund compounds in Connecticut, picking the bones of the fallen––when possible helping them fall before picking their bones. This story from BusinessInsider is particularly chilling.

This paragraph from the Guardian caught my eye.

"But a new theory is emerging among traders and economists. The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food and causing misery around the world."

In other words, crisis is more profitable than stability. If that's the opposite of what most modern economies base their prosperity on, that's fine with the speculators who profit. Picture a cat playing with a mouse.

Real Economics describes the center where global food speculation takes place, the Chicago Board of Trade. Some will point out the necessary mechanism of the Chicago Board; it gets food where it's needed in an efficient fashion through the market system. But what happens when the market makers realize they profit more from inefficiency, from shortage, from panic? Markets need to have a superego to rule their id, an Apollonian side to keep the Dionysian under control. We need responsible, humane governing institutions, which is exactly what Republican radicals in the U.S. Congress are trying to shut down and disempower.

The World Food Programme paints an ugly picture of the profitability of global hunger.

The role played by speculator manipulation of supply is no secret in the fuel category (from McClatchy News)

What is the result? More of our limited consumer dollars are locked into chasing fuel and food, leaving less for other areas of spending. It works like a heavy stone tied to the ankle of the economy. What makes it harder for 300 million Americans fills the pockets of the speculators, which means hedge funds, banks, Wall Street, the folks who fund the Tea Party.

Do market makers actively precipitate disaster in order to profit from it? There were plenty of shills pushing the profit opportunities in the BP oil spill––even if they didn't cause it.

But you have to wonder sometimes. In the week Dick Cheney's memoir hits the shelves this question should strike all of us: what influence did Dick Cheney, the former chair of Halliburton, have on the awarding of billions in war contracts to his old firm? Did he want the war to happen for private business reasons? Iraq was a war virtually made for Halliburton. The U.S. protectorate supervised the collapse of the Iraq system, the destruction of all its institutions and their subsequent privatization. Is Iraq the perfect model of Disaster Capitalism? (This Amy Goodman-Naomi Klein interview caught the drift as it was happening in 2005, but the reporting never reached the mainstream press.)

The ruling ideas behind what Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine aren't conservative. They are the opposite of conservative. They are radical. They are anti-patriotic. They are anti-institutional, anti-national, anti-citizen. They are against the notion of functioning societies and economies because breakdown is what makes these operators rich. Wide public failure is their opportunity. Your hunger is their feast. And increasingly, these are the people at the controls at the centers of the so-called Free Market.