Crescent Dunes Nevada |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retried
Both President Trump and his sidekick Pence have proclaimed that the US will never be a socialist country. They really mean social democratic which is a far cry from an economy being socialist but still.
Both President Trump and his sidekick Pence have proclaimed that the US will never be a socialist country. They really mean social democratic which is a far cry from an economy being socialist but still.
In reality, the US is a “socialist” country when it comes to
subsidizing capital. There are numerous examples of how “socialist” the US is using its own definition, government hand
outs. There is Congress where the members of the two capitalist parties enjoy
wages, benefits and conditions even the French public sector workers would
envy. There are the sports stadiums,
that are built with public backing and the taxpayer even guarantees so many
seats will be purchased whether filled or not. The rail and energy industry
received free land for tracks their trains to run on, free either side of the
rails for 20 miles across a whole continent. The auto bosses would receive
similar deals a century later as the taxpayer coughed up for a national freeway
system, the tracks on which their autos would run. The free enterprise system is not so vibrant
is it.
The capitalist class does
very well from government spending. The forever wars are good for the investors
in the offense industry. As long few US workers die, the public will be pretty
much pacified. But the most important developments of the day have all been
developed through public means; the Internet, life saving drugs and so on. The
research is socialized, the profits privatized. This is a smart move for the
owners of capital; they use their government wisely.
I see that the Nevada’s $1
billion Crescent Dunes solar project, a structure of ten thousand mirrors two
miles wide between Las Vegas and Reno which began operations in 2015, is now obsolete.
As of this year it only had one customer according to Business Week, Warren
Buffet’s NV Energy Inc. and NV Energy has pulled out.
And this was public money
that was lost here because the loans the private developer, SolarReserve took
out to build the project, were guaranteed by the government. The capitalist,
unlike the miser, wrote Marx, doesn’t try to protect money by hoarding it. The
capitalist is adventurous, takes a risk, throws it in to circulation with the
intention of more money returning than they forked out. That doesn’t mean they
pass on a free lunch though, and having the taxpayer cover their losses if
their investments turn sour is something they can’t pass up so they’ll swallow
their pride and take the deal. Principles are hard come by when it comes to
capital accumulation.
With Crescent Dunes, the US taxpayer
is on the hook for $737 million in loan guarantees according
to Bloomberg. Apparently, solar
energy technology has increased so rapidly in 4 years that the Crescent Dunes plant
is now inefficient. It’s hard to accept that this situation just up and
surprised the folks making all the decisions, after all, the same politicians,
experts and capitalists that run the show are the same folks that send probes
and humans in to the cosmos. The whole space business is a huge government hand
out to private capital.
Another disastrous situation
contributes to this mess, and that is the politicians of the two Wall Street
parties being guardians of our public land. The one time Senate majority
leaders, Harry Reid ensured that this monstrous project could be built on
public land. The truth is, they are guardians of public lands as they relate to
commodity production, how they can be a profitable venture. The US predator in
Chief has just opened up hundreds of thousands of acres of public land in
California to mining and energy companies. All the talk of saving the
environment and caring about our world from the US state department and other
mouthpieces of the business world are phony. The indigenous people should be
the first choice in leading the guardianship of public lands but we saw what
happened to them at Standing Rock.
So with Crescent, the
reliable ole US taxpayer has taken over the project as the private company that
built it has gone to court to repossess it. We should recall that socialist
measures were used to drag capitalism from the abyss back in 2007. Huge swathes
of industry were nationalized although the term used in the mass media was
“conservatorship”. The same process occurred with the Savings and Loan debacle
a crisis that arose because of legislation introduced by both Democratic and
Republican parties. The debt of the S&L debacle was nationalized and a
government agency, the Resolution Trust Corp., created to facilitate cleaning
up the mess. The worst S&L’s were thrown out and the best of them sold back
to the private sector that caused the problem at bargain basement prices. One person went to jail.
Important social needs like
energy, transportation, education housing and so on, cannot be in private hands
and their development determined by the profit motive. The public at large, the
worker, the consumer, the small farmer and so on, are not included in such decisions
and only through including the great mass of the people whose lives are
dependent on such things can the worst mistakes be avoided. Profit should not
enter in to it and with private capital it must. If studied closely, the market
is a catastrophic failure.
We live in a capitalist
system. The politicians that make legislation that affect how we live our lives
make those decisions primarily on the basis of how much profit will arise out
of them. This aside, it is still a step forward and generally more efficient in
human terms if how we produce energy and where, are public sector decisions.
Workers have no party and independent voice in the body politic at this point
and in the last analysis the government will represent the interest of capital
and defend the system, but we have more input and control than if these
decisions are made in the boardrooms of major corporations. It is a small step
to a genuine democratic socialist system of production and planning, it is
psychologically important in that it undermines the private sector and the
propaganda that the market is the answer to all things.
Readers may recall the
collapse of Solyndra whose plant is not far form where I sit. That company
filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and the taxpayer backed $535 million in loan
guarantees there. These are just two limited examples of the failure of the
so-called free market. There are many more examples out there from the fires in
Australia to the plastic in the oceans and the homelessness and mentally ill we
see sleeping in the streets. And then there’s the $2 trillion in forever wars.
And that’s just the US. And we can’t solve world hunger?
The failure of these two
ventures has dumped almost $1 billion in the US taxpayers’ lap. What would you
do with that? How long will the US working class allow ourselves to live in a
society where they have no real say in how the wealth and resources of that
society are used? Sooner than later I hope, we are running out of time.
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