When Entrepreneurs Become Profiteers

Ah capitalism. There’s nothing like the smell of capitalism in the morning. On the morning of a hurricane’s landfall, that is. It smells of . . . fetid turds.

Want to know why we are in a financial s**tstorm these days? Greed. Sheer greed. The greed of entrepreneurs. The greed of capitalists. The sheer greed of businessmen who will stop at nothing to get more for them and deprive everyone else of theirs; including breaking all the rules set against them to do this.

That’s why we are in this financial fix.

And greed isn’t just on Wall Street. It’s on Main Street as well. It’s among us.

The proof is in the pudding. When Governor Perry declared southeast Texas a disaster area, that immediately triggered state laws that prevent entrepreneurs from making obscene profits on the misfortunes of others.

But that didn’t stop the people who run the Hotel Nacogdoces in Nacogdoces, Texas from doubling their standard room rates of $49.99 a night to $99.99. Profiteering on the hard luck of Hurricane Ike evacuees.

That didn’t stop the people who run the Super 8 Brookshire Hotel in Katy, Texas from raising their room $99 per night room rate to $125 as Ike evacuees sought safe haven from a monster hurricane that was bearing down on their houses.

That didn’t stop gas stations from hiking their already burdensome prices all around the southeast.

No, it did not.

It seems we have a new plague that has spread across our country. It isn’t a biological plague, but a psychological one. The plague is called greed and while it has always been with us, it has been restricted to a small subpopulation of our society in the past.

In the past, most of us had a sense of fair play and empathy. Those two have been replaced by raw greed and it is more common than it has been in the past. More common because people have become aware of the fact that “greed is good” to abuse a quote from the movie Wall Street. Good because now it goes unpunished.

Greed is now rewarded.

Prove me wrong, I dare you.

Al Gore Accepts Nobel Peace Prize

Wow.

I’ll bet you never thought THAT would ever happen. I have been reading his acceptance speech. It’s posted on The Huffington Post.

It’s pretty wordy as Al Gore gets to be, but I liked a couple of things that he did. I like how he went back to the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, Alfred Nobel, who became shocked when he read his own obituary, a premature mistake, that labeled him “The Merchant of Death”. Years later he established the Peace Prize as a contribution to society’s pursuit of peaceful channels of human intercourse.

Why do I like this? Because my first thought, upon hearing that Gore was nominated for the Peace Prize was this: yes, Al Gore did good work in promoting the notion of global warming, but does this warrant the peace prize? Where is peace and humanity promoted?

I finally settled down on this because I started to think about what would happen if our oceans invaded densely populated coastal areas, if our arable land could no longer support the crops necessary to feed the planet.

War in the face of diminishing land area and resources is inevitable.

But then Gore threw this in for good measure:

“We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.”

So it fits. The very origin of the prize was meant to correct a mistake. Had Nobel not figured out a way to produce stable nitro glycerin, saving thousands of lives in explosion accidents, he would probably have saved millions of lives lost to TNT in war.

The fight to end global warming is also a fight to correct a mistake.

At the end of his speech, Al Gore says that the next generation will ask two questions:

“The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: 'What were you thinking; why didn't you act?'”

“Or they will ask instead: 'How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?'”

The answer to the first question is too unthinkable. The answer is, profits and greed, blind profits and greed. The Bush Regime has been sitting on top of this one because the corporations that have bought him and his cronies will stand to lose if they have to change what they are doing right now.

It’s. All. About. The. Money.

And linear thinking. Republican linear thinking. There will be a paradigm shift and businesses will come to see what others have already seen: fighting Global Warming is going to be a lucrative business.

Especially to those who get in on the ground floor.

Think of it. Think of all the companies that will spring up to, say, capture carbon dioxide emissions and sell the gas to oil companies to be used in carbon dioxide injection projects? Projects that capture methane emissions and then sell the captured gas to fertilizer manufacturers? I keep hearing of new ideas all the time.

What about new environmental laws that change the way we create and use energy? What about passing laws that forbid development of housing projects unless they come with their own wind mill farm?

These are golden opportunities for the corporations, and some of them are coming around to these ideas.

You ju$t have to $peak their language.