We are so well and truly screwed:
OK, here’s something that might even be scarier than the latest report about the dumping of “mystery liquids” in Pennsylvania’s water supply. The man that Gov. Tom Corbett is tasking to deal with the problem is utterly clueless.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Michael Krancer, your next Pennsylvania environmental protection commissioner:
In his opening remarks, Krancer emphasized a business-first philosophy of environmental regulation, saying “Responsible, strong, vibrant and growing business is necessary as an engine for the protection of the environment.”
If anyone had doubts about that, he said, “One need only look to the former Iron Curtain experience and the pollution that is there to prove that a moribund economy is the enemy of environmental protection.”
Democratic Senator Daylin Leach, who had introduced Krancer and said he “could not be happier” with Krancer’s appointment, responded “They also had very weak environmental enforcement, and that’s a reason there were the pollution problems there were.”
Leach is right (about enforcement, not about Krancer) and Krancer is beyond clueless. The reality is that by the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, both capitalistic and communist economies were ruining the environment, partly from ignorance and partly from governments in both systems not aggressively tackling the problem.
You see- the Iron Curtain environmental disaster happened because of a lack of economic freedom, not because a bunch of autocratic lunatics who thought they were doing the people’s work and who ignored or manipulated science and attacked anyone who pointed out they were wrong allowed industries to do whatever they wanted. Sound familiar?
David Koch
Drill baby, drill!
geg6
My state and my governor have me so depressed that I can’t even discuss it rationally any more. We are so fucked. We Keystone Staters are District 12 in Panem now (waves to all the Hunger Games fans).
Meanwhile, OT and all, but it made me laugh:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03/the-tent-offensive.html
Redshift
Speaking of which, did anyone else see the web ad opposing regulation of debit card fees that declared “price controls didn’t work in the Soviet Union, and they won’t work here!”
Hilarious.
Chris
@Redshift:
Oh oh oh! Can I try?
“Shrinking the size of government didn’t work in Somalia, and it won’t work here either!”
I’m so perceptive, I amaze myself! Oh fer sure!
jl
I am glad that Mr. Cole has seen the light, and may rejoin the fold of the righteous:
“the Iron Curtain environmental disaster happened because of a lack of economic freedom”
In the US, we all remember that it was Galtian industrial corporations that lead the way in fighting pollution.
Evil totalitarian irrational and dysfunctional political and social decision making, and parasitical bureaucrats had nothing to do with it.
Just think what a mess this country would be in if progressive social democracy had been allowed to set up, for example, some useless bureaucratic environmental ‘protection’ agency.
Ash Can
Were Krancer and Leach able to sit down at the same table without running into each other and knocking each other down?
Legalize
What’s the big deal. Our Koch Masters probably have their own private waters supply. So they’ll be fine. Only moochers rely on public water supplies for their water.
JPL
Look if we just do away with all regulations, our corporate overlords will do it right this time. After all most are good Christians.
Napoleon
I am pretty sure when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in the 60’s they tied it to Soviet agents and cleared J & L Steel, Standard Oil of Ohio, US Steel and Republic Steel of any involvement.
JPL
@geg6: He sure has a lot of balls.
Zifnab
If the BP rig explosion has taught the Gulf Coast fishing industry anything, its that regulation is bad for business.
Martin
Ah, yes, because drying up a 26,000 square mile lake (the 4th largest in the world) had no adverse effect on the economy or productivity.
Look at the magnificent shipping!
Witness the bustling harbor!
Zifnab
@geg6: The first one is always free.
Chris
Amazing that in their world, “Soviet Union” and “big government” have become synonyms for each other – hence, the reason the Soviet government was so screwed up was because it was big. Not because it was dictatorial, or non-transparent, or unaccountable, or unrestrained by checks and balances, no, just because it was “big.” According to them, Lenin created a value-added tax and it was all over for Russia. Or something.
Ellie
Heckuva job, Krancy!
trollhattan
Good god, we’re supposed to grow the economy into environmental bliss? How the fig does that work?
What these shills fail to acknowledge is that preventing pollution costs the tiniest fraction of what it costs to clean up–presuming cleanup is even possible.
JC has it right, we are well and truly screwed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/us/04gas.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1299171670-9JQydOT8zfIrv2a2ImGTUw
Waldo
Krancer? Let me guess — it rhymes with “cancer”?
lacp
Re Marcellus Shale, if you’re in the Philly area, this may be of interest: http://agricultureandmarcellus.eventbrite.com/
General Stuck
One man’s economic freedom is another man’s nightmare on Love Canal.
Or, as my grandpappy used to say, don’t worry about it son, rivers run downhill and we is uphill.
The Dangerman
These assholes know that unregulated capitalism is a proven disaster, right?
Right?
RIGHT?
I need a drink.
Just Some Fuckhead
There is nothing so egregious that cannot be excused by invoking the specter of Stalin.
Riggsveda
Let me tell you about how Corbett’s “pro-business” agenda is going to work out:
As a state employee less than 5 years from retirement, I have absolutely no intention of sticking around to spend my money and taxes in this devolving soon-to-be-third-world debacle of a state, where I can only look forward to the steady erosion of my rights as a worker and the further ruination of my drinking water and air. I should poison myself for this? I’m taking all my assets and booking, the closer to Canada the better, as soon as I can. If enough people eventually feel the same way I do, I wonder how attractive the Commonwealth will be to investors and labor once it resembles a peniless Mordor?
kdaug
“In Soviet Russia, you don’t have price controls, price controls have YOU!”
(Sorry).
(Not really).
General Stuck
Dog eat dog philosophy teaches us it is not all disaster when one dog is fed and the other digested. It is the unspoken rule of commerce, that you can cure many a social ill keeping the dog population in check, and have enough left over for country club membership.
I think Brick Oven Bill said as much once upon a time, or was it Plato?
Dennis SGMM
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Or by saying that it’s “business friendly.” Unions, labor laws, environmental protections aren’t business friendly so it’s clear that they must go. In order to become competitive with the Third World it’s necessary to turn America into a Third World nation.
dmbeaster
Wow. Free-market numbskullery taken to new limits. And a new meme – it is big government that allegedly causes pollution – who coulda known.
kdaug
@General Stuck: I think it was Jesus.
Brachiator
@Redshift:
Which reminds me of the best quip about the difference between the US and Soviet systems.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s the other way around.
El Cid
If people want an environment, they can manifest their ecological desires through the market.
If businesses do not leave a sufficient ecology for consumers’ preferences for survival and basic species diversity, then consumers can choose to shop for a different ecology.
Market experts have not yet figured out how consumers may purchase under different ecological conditions when Earth’s existing ecologies are destroyed, but they assure us that such details will soon be worked out.
Because, freedom.
cleek
@Napoleon:
luckily, that’s a spoof.
geg6
OT, but this guy is my new favorite Dem:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/awol-wisconsin-dem-beats-the-system-gets-his-paycheck-mailed-to-him.php?ref=fpblg
El Cid
@Brachiator: Liberals don’t want you to know this, but one of the first things Stalin did was to ban high fees when debit cards are used for purchases.
Litlebritdifrnt
@JPL:
Speaking of which I was over a TPM watching a video of a bunch of “so called” Christians yelling at a Muslim gentleman who was simply standing in front of the White House peacefully praying. They were chanting “jesus, jesus, jesus” one guy got in the Muslim gentleman’s face and said this (and I am not making this up I swear to the FSM) “what kind of God tells his followers to kill others who don’t believe in him?”
As my jaw dropped to my desk I wondered if this “so called” Christian had ever actually, you know, read the Bible?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@El Cid:
Here in NM we are busy building a spaceport. Book your tickets now. If enough people pay cash up front, I’m sure Bernie Madoff Astronautics Inc. will be able to find a habitable planet for us to emigrate to.
Villago Delenda Est
The assholes of the Communist parties rejected science for ideological reasons…the facts did not support their ideology, so they ignored the facts.
Of course, Capitalists would NEVER do this. Ever. Also.
General Stuck
Anyone wants to see the results of a unfettered capitalism, should take a slow drive through the coal fields of Appalachia, where before 1978, the strip mining industry could do pretty much anything it wanted and that legacy remains. It is a trip to the moon by automobile.
It is only marginally better than it was, and still is mostly an incubator for what an American Oligarchy would look like. Not uncommon to see a coal operator mansion, overlooking a collection of people living in not much more than huts. Unions made it better, over the years, but not without plenty of bloodshed and new ways to skirt responsibility from the well off.
The rich become their own authority, when conditions are ripe. And they will tell you with a straight face that screwing you without a kiss, is only for your own good. Sounds like that is the case in PA/
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Likewise, you can apply that reasoning, flawlessly, to “big” business.
And it actually works.
Warren Terra
Calling it the “Iron Curtain Environmental Disaster” is actually very ironic; the pollution problem in the former Soviet republics is pretty awful, but because it was a viciously enforced no-man’s-land the actual Iron Curtain itself wound up spending a half-century as a rigorously protected designated wildlife zone, one that was almost contiguous from the Adriatic to the Baltic. There was a good BBC Radio 4 documentary on it maybe five years ago. It’s not what they meant when they said “The Iron Curtain”, and Wilderness Protection was never the point of it, but it was part of the effects.
singfoom
The kicker here, is the underlying logic. Of course, our Galtian Overlords wouldn’t poison our water supply or harm our environment.
That would be bad for business, and as Galtian Overlords, by definition, they only do good business.
If they only had the perspective to realize that being environmentally clean was actually good for their bottom line. How hard is that? What the fucking fuck? Use less resources, recycle as much as you can and spend the least amount possible having waste hauled away?
Fuck it, just throw it in the river. I mean, have they never heard about GE & the Hudson river?
Maybe they could work it into their advertising:
COMING SOON TO A RIVER NEAR YOU WITHOUT YOU EVEN KNOWING IT: A NEW SUPERFUND SITE!!!!
Yaaaayyy unregulated capitalism.
FlipYrWhig
Wait — is he saying that because a bad economy doesn’t protect the environment, logically, consequently, a good economy _does_ protect the environment? Is there a name for that particular logical fallacy, or is it just reductio ad krancerum?
Mike in NC
Pretty sure the Republicans in Washington have the EPA and a bunch of other regulatory bodies in their cross-hairs. They just decided their first priority was
jobs and the economybanning abortion, busting labor unions, and making sure anybody anywhere has unlimited access to guns.Villago Delenda Est
When you remember that the Communists basically grabbed all the means of production and dedicated them first into “defense” expenditures, no matter what the environmental or social cost, it becomes clear that MICs are bad for flowers, children, and other growing things.
gwangung
Taiwan, that hotbed of communism and socialism, had massive environmental and pollution problems during their big economic expansion.
(Wait a minute? Taiwan has lots and lots of non-white people, so they don’t count).
toujoursdan
@Warren Terra:
The same is true along the Korean DMZ now and there are proposals to make it a conservation zone if/when the DPRK regime collapses.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
Stalin also pushed for a competitor to a famous Decadent West credit card. The superior Stalinist version was the Gulag Express. “Don’t Leave for Siberia Without It.”
JPL
@Litlebritdifrnt: The crusades weren’t that bad.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
The dirty little secret of the Koch Brothers: their fortune is based on payments from Stalin’s debit card, back in the 30’s.
Poopyman
@General Stuck: Exactly!
So as someone who lives along the Chesapeake Bay, I say FUCK YOU, Pennsylvania! State of my birth. Sideways and with a big natural gas well.
James Carville’s description of the state as Philly to the East, Pittsburgh to the West, and Alabama in the middle is starting to sound like a slander of Alabama.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
How about: Welcome to the Easter Island Lumberjacks Convention ?
Ruckus
@Napoleon:
Beat me to it.
Poopyman
@Litlebritdifrnt: @JPL: The “Crusades” were a hoax.
Ash Can
@Litlebritdifrnt: The “Christian” could answer that even without reading the Bible — Allah is his God too.
terry
how many times are we Pennsylvanians going to have to say “we’re sorry”?
Southern Beale
Wow. Just learned that rw blogger John Hinderaker’s law firm represents Koch Industries.
I did not know this.
I still can’t get over the fact that Hinderaker is not only a lawyer but he teaches law.
Poopyman
@terry: I’m guessing somewhere on the order of once a week until you can kick Corbett & Co out of office.
Annamal
My partner’s got a real interest in the Chernobyl disaster(he was planning to use the event and its contrbuting factors as a case study for his thesis).
What got me among the contributing factors was not so much the problems of reporting problems within a dictatorial system where squeaky wheels could be punished severely but that there were economic incentives offered for finishing the plant as early as possible (I think also below cost but I’m not as sure of that).
The substandard construction was a huge contributing factor to the severity of the disaster and it could potentially happen under a laxly regulated capitalistic society where people don’t speak out for fear for their jobs and health insurance.
When you add together a loosening regulatory system, a system where someone keeping their job can be literally life or death for them and their families and economic incentives for speed and carelessness you have a potential for some truly awful things in the very near future.
FreeAtLast
@Waldo: We need a limerick contest!
dmbeaster
The dog eat dog jokes about unregulated capitalism reminds me of the classic joke about capitalism vs. communism told in the eastern bloc in the bad old days. It goes like this. In capitalism, everyone knows that it is man against man. Communism is better because it is the other way around.
Ash Can
@Southern Beale:
It’s all in the family, isn’t it?
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
So I’ve heard. Supposedly, Fred Koch’s time in the Soviet Union is what turned him into a raging anti-communist.
He was, however, a founding member of the John Birch Society, who according to Jane Meyer of the New Yorker, was a Mussolini admirer and disparager of the civil rights movement. So it’s not like the man wasn’t an authoritarian thug himself.
Bulworth
Well, as long as our pollution problem is less than the pollution problem in the old Soviet Union then we don’t need no stinkin environmental regulations. Not sure why no one else has made this most excellent point before. But if our pollution problem would someday surpass the pollution problem in the old Soviet Union, would we then need environmental regulations? Or will the reichwing have thought of a new goal post upon which to allow or prevent environmental regulation?
Bulworth
True. Also, too, the next thing he did was make gay marriage mandatory.
scav
OT detail to be filed under “Things that make a Bad Impression”
London School of Economic ties to Gaddafi regime, plus a few more allegations of plagiarised parts of a doctoral thesis to bookend the one that took down the German minister recently.
This too, after the French foreign minister’s ties to the family in Tunisia, makes one really understand why that part the world really really doesn’t trust the so-called West’s so-called blather about democracy. There’s a WikiLeaks connection for those keeping count. Elites are just covering themselves in glory all-round, aren’t they?
JPL
@Chris: Since the tea party folk have called the President a fascist, does that mean Fred Koch would have supported the President? Someone tell his sons.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
The thing is, Stalin invited Koch in for his expertise, and was planning, it seems, all along to short change him. Koch of course took this as an indictment of communism, not an indictment of asshole dictators.
Once again, drawing the wrong conclusions on the wrong data, missing the point, entirely.
Chris
@JPL:
It would certainly seem that way. Somebody also tell William F. Buckley that when he was cheerleading for General Franco, he was cheerleading for a liberal. Traitor!
@Villago Delenda Est:
Hold up, sounds like I don’t have the whole story here. Are you saying Koch invested in Soviet Russia and Stalin cheated him out of what he’d earned?
Because if so, that makes it a lot clearer. Koch wasn’t angry about the oppression in the Soviet Union at all: he was just mad because their dictator owed him money. And that would explain a ton.
Southern Beale
@Chris:
Well you know, Big Fucking Deal. I spent a week in the Soviet Union when I was in college and knew that Communism, at least as practiced in the USSR, was awful. I remember going to the Tuna Fish Store … a store with nothing but cans of tuna fish in it, all the same brand because of course it was the People’s Tuna Fish. I remember seeing long lines for consumer goods and asking people what they were in line to buy and they had no clue: they just knew something was for sale and they probably needed it.
So wow. Communism sucked, big shocker. On the other hand, my week in the USSR showed me that the Soviet people were just like anyone else, trying to have a good life and provide for their families, and were not the evil stereotypes we’d been force-fed in America.
electricgrendel
They seriously got a guy whose last name rhymes with “cancer” to defend the deregulation that allows dumping of radioactive waste and carcinogens into water?
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Stalin contracted Koch for oil extraction technology and training. Koch was thinking “great, I can exploit this rube for a long period of time”, but Stalin was thinking “I’ll use this guy to get the expertise I need, develop my own technocrats to run the oil fields, and dispose of him once I’ve got what I need to keep this running.”
So Koch’s idea of a long term gig was not what Uncle Joe had in mind. Naturally, they parted ways on unfriendly terms.
Southern Beale
In other news, there are now palm trees at the Wisconsin capital.
Abso fucking hilarious!!!!!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Villago Delenda Est:
Do you know who else inked a deal with Uncle Joe and later parted ways on unfriendly terms?
Dimestore Chaucer
@FreeAtLast:
There once was a man named Krancer,
who said, “the market’s the only answer,”
but he had to go Galt,
so it wasn’t his fault,
when all the townsmen nearby got cancer.
Chris
@JPL:
Also re Koch and Mussolini… it’s pretty well known that a lot of Republicans and wealthy backers like Koch sympathized with fascism to some degree or other especially before the war started. I’ve often wondered, how different would politics be if Roosevelt had used that to try and create a McCarthy-like atmosphere during World War Two in which he used war hysteria to smear the entire Republican Party and anyone too sympathetic to them as “fascists,” “fascist sympathizers,” “a list of card-carrying fascists on Wall Street,” etc? In other words, done to them what Joe McCarthy, Robert Welch and William Buckley did to Democrats in the 1950s?
And I realize there was a ton of war hysteria during WW2, but it mostly was directed towards minorities, mainly Japanese- and to a lesser but still noticeable extent German- and Italian-American communities. I don’t think it was ever harnessed for partisan purposes, definitely not to the degree that Republicans did it during the Cold War.
And I’m not saying it would’ve been a good thing if FDR had done that, I’m just wondering 1) if it ever occurred to people at the time, and 2) how that might have changed politics, e.g. if the smear would’ve stuck to Republicans and made it harder for them to claim the “patriotic” label in future years (and conversely made it easier for Democrats to claim same label).
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris:
Buckley read Lodenhosen’s book on this subject, realized that he had supported liberals all along, and promptly died. It was central to Jonah’s point.
Chris
@Southern Beale:
Oh, I totally hear you – I’ve been to Cuba, think their system sucks hairy ass, and yet am still a liberal. I’m not saying Koch was being logical, or even that he was telling the truth, just that it’s what he claimed as the root of his anti-communism.
@Villago Delenda Est:
Thanks for the story. Sounds like, indeed, Koch’s hatred of Stalin had nothing to do with the repression in Russia and everything to do with the fact that he didn’t get all the profit he wanted.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Few liberals have ever been pro-Communist.
Davis X. Machina
@Warren Terra: Funny effect on some of that wildlife, though. Apparently there are some deer herds that still act as though there were a fence up, with interesting implications for learning, and its transmission…
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Davis X. Machina:
Last time I checked we’ve got some large populations of hairless hominids in this country which exhibit the same symptoms. Funny thing that.
David in NY
@Villago Delenda Est: “The thing is, Stalin invited Koch in for his expertise, and was planning, it seems, all along to short change him.”
Looks to me like Stalin was just a better capitalist than Koch. His technique was just a precursor to the way Goldman Sachs treated its customers (legally it seems).
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think Marx has a lot of interesting things to say, and he was, after all, inspired by Adam Smith, but Communism as practiced both in the Soviet Union and China is just capitalist assholes running wild, in a lot of ways. Actual worker control was as alien to Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev as it would be to Jack Welch, Henry Ford, or John D. Rockefeller. Which is why the post WWII German system scares the living shit out of all of them.
Omnes Omnibus
@David in NY: Averell Harriman managed to make money in the Soviet Union. Maybe our (liberal-ish)plutocrats are simply better than the plutocrats on the right.
El Cid
O/T. Except for the Masters of the Universe bit.
Former Goldman Sachs director Raj Gupta sued by SEC with insider trading from 2008, using a method made possible by the financial reform bill.
Villago Delenda Est
@Davis X. Machina:
There are in the vast publically owned, privately leased rangelands of the west “cow guards” at places where the road crosses a fence line. Metal grates that are difficult for cattle to walk across. In some places, these are replaced by painted lines, which with conditioned cattle work just as well, because they see the pattern of the metal grate on the road and avoid it.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
Hey, (glowing) green shoots!
kdaug
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Prescott Bush?
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason (formerly frosty)
@geg6: Yes, your state and mine, getting more fucked over by the minute. I at least have the comfort of having stood at the polls fighting it last fall. And the despair of watching everything I fought for overwhelmed by a sea of South Pennsylvania Angry White People.
trollhattan
@David in NY:
My only question: Did Koch senior cash the checks? If he tore them up while refudiating Stalin and his works and broccoli, then yay for pappa Koch. OTOH, if he took the money he can STFU.