One of those “please share” items so I’m sharing it because wo.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said it best: “Turn that frown upside down oil-soaked neighbourhood, you can get a job cleaning it up if you just have the right attitude. We’ll make it worth your while. That is seriously what Kinder Morgan is arguing to the freaking Canadian government about why they should be allowed to triple the capacity of their pipeline.”
And for our next act: breaking windows to create jobs! Now, I think there’s a term for that …
How old school, where job creation is aligned so closely with spewing toxic death.
Sorta like crime clean-up crews that get rid of all the blood and gore…
…followed by more jobs for doctors, nurses, and caretakers to deal with the inevitable damage to the health of clean-up workers, lawyers to deal with the financial consequences.
And followed again by massive layoffs, since the government will be picking up the tab and the oil companies will be dodging the taxes. Gotta balance the budget, don’cha know!
Another example of the long game corporations have been playing since the start of the Industrial Revolution, i.e. the transfer of the costs of the externalities of production onto the taxpayers, the environment or indigenous people. Of course it’s supported by orthodox economic theory, disasters increase GDP.
@RJW
You are mistaken about what orthodox economic theory says about repairing damage. While disaster recovery will probably increase GDP, that doesn’t mean economists think disasters are good, since economists are well aware that not everything that increases GDP is good. In fact, as natashatasha alluded to upthread, there’s even a term in economics for that idea – the Broken Windows Fallacy.
I didn’t mean that ‘economists think that disasters are good’, but that theory can be appropriated by corporations to support their agendas, as in the statement by (the company?) Kinder Morgan, I should have been more explicit.
Now if only they would act as if they were well aware of that fact…
@8
Yes, however, it rather depends on which side of the ideological divide they’re on, economics isn’t really a science.