The War Against Energy Efficiency
To prove his case against global warming, which Glenn Beck labels a “load of socialist, communist crap,” the right-wing talk-show host announced his war against energy-efficient light bulbs – on the basis that people who believe in energy efficiency and conservation are anti-capitalist.
I normally try to pretend that ignorance at this level doesn’t exist in the country I love – or at least that it’s not wildly popular, but doing so is essentially dishonest. Beck’s net worth is $150 million, derived from the fact that he had, at his peak, 3 million listeners/viewers per day (approximately 5,000 times that of 2GreenEnergy).
This attack on energy efficiency is hard to take, given that every single one of the Fortune 500 has a corporate sustainability initiative in place that includes a great deal of thinking and implementation in terms of energy consumption. I guess there are people stupid enough to think Fred Smith at FedEx or Jeffrey Immelt at GE are Marxists, or dupes of Marxists, but I sure don’t want to have dinner with them.
Of course, Glenn Beck isn’t a business person with a constituency of customers and supply chain partners; he’s a (self-described) entertainer, pandering to large, lowbrow audiences. He says whatever he wants, regardless of its real-world consequences, if he believes it will buy him a fraction of a percentage in ratings points. Not exactly a high-integrity way of life.
As I drove my daughter home from school this afternoon and we talked about her future, we ventured into the subject of the boys she might meet in college, and her life’s many possibilities. About her future husband, I said, “Your life will be fine, as long as you marry a man you’re truly in love with.” I should have mentioned, “But there’s another ingredient in a happy decent life: you need a conscience.”
The success of this misguided man is one small and painful symptom of the ruinous contagion of greed.
In the 1980’s, there were over 40 separate major print and broadcast media firms doing business in this country – that healthy variety has been swallowed up by these five grand gobblers: Disney, TimeWarner, Viacom, NBC Universal, and NewsCorporation. Similarly, over two dozen separate major companies in the internet space have been absorbed and digested by just three massive amorphous amoebae: Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 relaxed FCC regulations so that single companies could control far more of the radio market. Across the turn of the century, News Corporation Media ally Clear Channel became a massive low budget outlet for Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh, et al. Before long, Clear Channel owned over 1,200 stations nationwide, including as many as eight stations in each of several markets.
In late 2001, Clear Channel distributed a now infamous memorandum to all those 1,200+ radio stations they owned. This memo recommended stations not air songs it labeled as “lyrically questionable” – a long roster of popular works from beloved performers that had violated the company’s political and moral litmus tests, including:
Louis Armstrong (“What a Wonderful World”); The Beatles (“Ob-La-Di; Ob-La-Da” and others); Jackson Browne (“Doctor My Eyes”); Credence Clearwater Revival (“Travelin’ Band”); The Hollies (“He Ain’t Heavy; He’s My Brother”); John Lennon (“Imagine”); Peter; Paul and Mary (“Blowin’ in the Wind”); Tom Petty (“Free Fallin'”); Simon & Garfunkel (“Bridge over Troubled Water”); Cat Stevens (“Peace Train”); James Taylor (“Fire and Rain”); U2 (“Sunday Bloody Sunday”); The Youngbloods (“Get Together”).
Clear Channel’s business model and operations resulted in sizeable debt and – after the company announced plans to become privately held (partly by Mitt Romney’s old firm Bain Capital) – over 500 stations have been sold or are now being sold. Still, Clear Channel’s partial failure is a rare exception among media gobblers, and rabid consolidation continues across the global media landscape.
As the circle of ownership and control shrinks up within the claws of an ever tinier elite, it remains an ever more lethal tragedy of modern life that the frothy influence of the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and their ringleader Rupert Murdoch will be continually deepened and broadened within the spirit of our society.
Stop the greed, stop the bribery, stop the insanity.
Yes, it’s gross. People will do or say anything for money, I guess. It’s certainly not the way I’m raising my kids….
Your children have a good-hearted father with a sharp mind, and for those reasons they have a better start in their lives than many young folk.
My hope is that you, and people like yourself in every generation – other compassionate and forward thinking individuals – will find ways to organize and to counter the direction in which our “civilizations” are spiraling.
Plato is said to have noted, “The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
In 1770, Edmund Burke wrote, in Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
In 1867, John Stuart Mill said, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
All three of these observations point to the necessity of a massive and enduring movement worthy of noble ideals.
The core challenges include:
First, that people who most crave power do not seek wisdom, and people who most seek wisdom do not crave power – with the predictable result that power follows a self-destructive course, particularly when bound up in the form of nationalist empires;
Second, that people who are shallow in their thinking and narrow in their views are most comfortable in factions and confederacies that reinforce their own misconceptions and prejudices, and they do not readily entertain doubts about their conclusions, however faulty and self-contradictory – while deep thinkers are accustomed to independent thought and action, and only rarely are they utterly convinced of their own righteousness;
Third, as you’ve observantly noted in the past, that people are largely split between two major philosophies of kinship – either that each is only responsible to and for their own well-being and perhaps that of intimate family members and dependent children, or, that all forms of life are family to a degree, and together people must all be stewards of each other’s fate and the health of the biosphere. Further, that these quite divergent values often generate based on whether we experience a firmly disciplined, or gently nurturing, style of parenting. Therefore such values are most often deep-rooted and self-reinforcing.
With the combined threats and impacts attending our species’ currently swollen and overflowing numbers and our development of, and adherence to, broadly destructive practices and technologies – from farming, to transportation, to weaponry – resulting in a grotesquely wasteful misuse and destruction of vital resources, we have proven ourselves capable of both great intentional slaughter and heedless plodding devastation on a planetary scale.
It seems to me that our hopes are in the following:
The liberated communication of knowledge and ideas over vast distances (as is now grandly facilitated by the internet);
The growing realization among the young that old habits and assumptions deserve examination and rebuke;
The rather belated recognition that our physical bodies are part of and quite dependent on our global environment (and that we must therefore live in concert with our natural world and not at the expense of it).
It’s been noted that we each have two beasts at war within us – one brave, resourceful and compassionate, and the other craven, stubborn and miserly – and the beast that wins is the one we most feed. In my observation, you have long been feeding the better beast.
Keep at it.
Thanks for the wonderful insight, and, of course, the kind words.