Bush’s ‘Clean Coal’ Boondoggle
Even George W. Bush acknowledges that he’s not the brightest porch light on the block, but he seems especially dim when it comes to energy policy.
W. says he wants to encourage a clean energy future for us. Does that mean solar, wind, conservation, and other nonpolluting sources of power? Are you kidding? He and his sidekick Dick Cheney think all of that stuff is a bunch of frou-frou, and his budget cuts back on these programs. Instead, he’s thinking coal. Only a Texas oil guy could take a whiff of a lump of coal and think, “ahhh … fresh air.” Coal, of course, is about the filthiest fuel we have, but George is putting his money (actually our money) behind an oxymoron called “clean coal technology.”
Coal is to clean energy what a Twinkie is to health food. Yet for the past 15 years, industry lobbyists have squeezed billions of dollars out of us taxpayers to subsidize utilities that build these clean-coal power plants that are only slightly less filthy than the old conventional belchers. This has been a boondoggle and a PR sham that pays utilities to build more dirty plants while claiming to be coming clean. These so-called clean-coal plants spew out 10 times more smog-causing pollutants and twice as much global-warming chemicals as do utilities using natural gas.
Bush’s energy plan, however, backs coal over natural gas — his bill triples the industry’s subsidy, providing $5.5 billion to encourage the use of coal to generate electricity. As a result, since George has been in the White House, gleeful utility executives have announced that they will build 24 new coal-fired plants across the country. The result for us will be dirtier air, more health problems, increased global warming, and more acid rain.
Credit Card Hucksters on Campus
It’s that time of the year again when college kids return to campuses all across the country, greeting classmates, meeting new teachers, and, of course … singing up for a batch of credit cards.
The banks hire students (usually buff and perky blondes) to peddle the cards, which often come in the school colors and feature the college mascot. T-shirts and other trinkets are offered to signees, along with come-ons about no fees, fixed low interest rates, and boundless credit. They might as well be shouting: “Free money!”
And, sure enough, too many kids, feeling the power of their newfound independence and the power of the plastic, quickly run up some serious debt. A recent study found that 78% of undergraduates have at least one credit card, and the average balance was nearly $3,000. Many of these students also get a quick lesson in how things really work in today’s CorporateWorld. Those promises about “no annual fee” and “a fixed low-interest rate” can turn out to be bait & switch flim-flams.
Fleet Bank offered a card that promised “no annual fee,” but customers who accepted the card were shocked a few months later to find a $35 charge added to their bills — for an “annual fee.” Other Fleet cardholders were promised a fixed rate of 8% interest, only to find that the rate soon rose to 10.5%. The scam, of course, is in the teenie-tiny print of the dense cardholders’ agreement, which says in convoluted legalese that the company can change the terms of the deal at any time.
The buff blondes hawking the cards to unsuspecting students never mention this scam. Welcome to the real world of CorporateWorld, kids.
B-1 Fiasco Keeps Flying
They say that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, but Washington has added a third certainty: Tax-eating boondoggles that won’t die.
Take the B-1 bomber … please.
This stealth bomber, which was designed to penetrate Soviet airspace undetected, has sopped up multiple billions of our tax dollars to fight an enemy that is now considered our ally. The bomber is notorious within the military as a bumbler — it turned out to be vulnerable to Soviet air defenses, it wasn’t stealthy, it had a steady history of equipment failures, and it tended to crash, and — get ready — it couldn’t fly in the snow. Hello … the Soviet Union has lots and lots of snow.
Yet, this bomb of a bomber is still around. We now have 93 of these lemons, costing $200 million a pop to build, plus we pay many millions more every year to operate each one of them. At last, though, the Pentagon has proposed a modest cutback in this embarrassing waste of tax dollars, asking Congress to mothball a third of the planes and consolidate the five B-1 bases into two.
This hardly amounts to killing off such a costly failure, but at least it’s a gesture to fiscal and military sanity. Unfortunately, sanity is not always welcome in Congress, and the proposed B-1 reduction has created a firestorm of protest by lobbyists for the corporations that assemble this boondoggle and by congress critters from the five states where the plane is based. Indeed, House Republicans have passed an amendment that actually prohibits any cuts to the B-1 program.
Surely there are real needs in America that could be addressed rather than continuing to shove millions of dollars into a plane that isn’t needed, isn’t wanted, and doesn’t work. To help end this fiasco and raise a flag of sanity in Washington, contact P.O.G.O., the Project on Government Oversight: 202/466-5539.
Jim Hightower’s latest book, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates, is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.
This article appears in August 24 • 2001.