For Labor Day 2012: Act Locally…

…Profiteer Globally

In the early part of World War II, Senator Harry Truman undertook a ten thousand mile expedition to investigate the nation’s readiness for war. His efforts created the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program–it became known as the Truman Committee. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, some called for the committee to be disbanded on the grounds that it might impede victory by meddling in strategy and tactics. It did not, and continued into 1948. The committee staged over seven-hundred hearings and produced fifty-one reports, each one approved by Democrats and Republicans on the panel. The committee’s investigative efforts saved the government approximately fifteen billion in 1948 dollars–around half a trillion in current dollars.

Perhaps we need a committee just like that to investigate our national response to anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance. “There is no substitute for facts,” Truman repeatedly told his committee. For example, The Climatebull Committee (nice ring, huh?) could investigate funding sources that undermine effective response to the changing climate, the worth of ethanol, the scam of billfold-science, the overhead of oversold R&D, or profiteering derived from energized weather events.

The Truman Committee conducted aggressive investigations into business practices. The investigations led to the uncovering of “waste, inefficiency, mismanagement and profiteering,” according to Truman, who argued that such behavior was unpatriotic. Truman even referred to some forms of profiteering as “treason.” The committee streamlined federal contract practices, investigated strategic resources, forced industry to account for substandard work, and nudged labor to discourage strikes. The committee saved lives and probably shortened the war. One result of the committee was the formation of an Office of War Mobilization charged with eliminating corruption in industry and illegal profits, as well as an excess-profits tax of up to ninety percent.

Illegal profits? Corruption in industry?

Can you imagine this concept of illegal profits? Our parents and grandparents found the concept simple and self-explanatory. Illegal profits were measured by principle and the national interest–not the graft they created. How about the concept of corruption in industry? Corporations are citizens who exist for the propagation of themselves through amoral and self-directed means. Supposedly, corporate citizens must not be held accountable the way a human is–through the danger they represent to society or the nation. Greed is good, right? (Now there’s a pile of manure masquerading as sophistication.) Corporate corruption is corporate sponsored activities that break the laws of this nation, like not paying taxes or deciding to inflict damage on the population because actuarial analysis says the cost of tort is less than repair of the product. In our modern day, breaking the law has also taken on another meaning–thanks to our corporate citizens. Breaking laws means rewriting the laws to foster corporate interests over the interests of the nation. Now that is a good one for the climate committee to investigate.

The Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense was Congress at its finest. A bipartisan panel, helpful and fair-minded, engaged in the national interest, a functioning government committee methodically exposing fraud in industry and correcting it in a time of crisis. Like the changing climate, World War II did not just appear before us. It developed over years to become an unavoidable problem. Even so, this summer our nation appears to be getting blind-sided by the energized climate: the droughts, the wildfires, sea level rise, infrastructure damage from storms, as well as a looming food crisis that will take a decade to fully develop. The climate events we are seeing are not a surprise; they are exactly what were expected. Climate scientists and others have been working tirelessly for over a generation to try to keep us from being blind-sided by an energized climate. Sadly, scientists have failed to acquire support because some citizens have fed the laypersons of this country, and our politicians, drivel about the science of climate change. Leaving most with the opinion science is for sale, as well as the perception we have a national problem with unreliable information–all fostered by misaligned ideology.

That has happened before. The Truman Committee’s success was based on studying the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War. It taught Truman what not to do. “I’d read the hearings those birds had–every damn one of them,” said Truman. The Civil War committee second-guessed President Lincoln, interfered with the military, grilled generals about failed campaigns–to the point that Robert E. Lee declared the committee worth two divisions of soldiers to him. Dominated by skewed ideology, the committee probably lengthened the Civil War.

Ironically, there is no ideological bickering today in the halls of power. That’s media spin. We have corruption masquerading as ideology and it is strangling our country keeping us from our tasks, including the changing climate. What’s old is new. So perhaps it is reassuring to recall a time when things worked on Capitol Hill. “Just knowing the committee was watching kept people honest,” said one legislator of the time. Imagine that, oversight of synthetic citizen amorality by a government charged with enforcing the social contracts that founded this nation.

So how do we get back to a government responsible to its human citizens? A multinational corporation can have no loyalty to the state. Therefore, the multinational corporations must not influence the policies of any nation. They represent a transnational threat to the sovereignty of every nation because of taxation. As a starting point to remove corporate influence, we should realign the costs of elections and the reelection process to remove the impact of their wealth. Then we remove citizen rights from the synthetic entities called corporations. That allows all the citizens of this nation to influence their government equally, not just amoral synthetic entities with no concept of treason. After all, wealth does not mean intelligence; it means luck, while climate change means bad luck for all of us.

“I have never yet found a contractor who, if not watched, would not leave the Government holding the bag,” said Senator Truman–and the changing climate is a bag too large for any single entity. It belongs to all of us…Humans.