On Corruption

by Craig ShieldsPosted on March 9, 2010 Posted in Renewables - Politics

I’m back on the East Coast for a few days.  When I come here I normally stay with my parents (they’re in their mid-late 80s) at their home in Philadelphia — which happens to be an apartment in a very nice retirement community.  As it often does, the conversation this evening turned to politics.  But unlike many political discussions between parents and their children, it was not at all rancorous.   Through our talks, we try to understand why the US as a nation is having so much difficulty in gaining traction in solving its most obvious problems: wars, healthcare, financial reform — and, of course, creating a level playing field for renewable energy.

I pointed out that each of these is rooted in what I label generally as corruption, which I define as the supremacy of money and power over common sense and decency in creating and enforcing our laws.  I acknowledged that corruption is a harsh word, and that it applies more accurately in some cases than in others.  But I do think that if our leaders were kind and sensible people, uninfluenced by the power of money, we would have immediate workable answers for these and many other pressing issues.

Since we’ve so often discussed this idea of corruption as it applies to energy policy, and since healthcare is so omnipresent in a retirement community, let me use this latter as an example.  The 94-year-old lady living across the beautifully carpeted hallway from my parents’ place recently had a knee replacement, which was, of course, 100% paid for by Medicare.  We encountered her in the hallway; she still struggles to walk — which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering her age — and so they’re in the process of scheduling a second such operation.

Meanwhile, our nation has millions of people 60 years younger who happen to be uninsured and face untended illness or financial ruination — or both — because they can’t get health insurance.

While my heart goes out to the old lady, I point out a simple, if ugly truth: the only reason she’s receiving serial knee replacements is that they are profitable. She’s thin as a toothpick, horribly frail, and quite obviously has no prognosis under which she’ll ever be able to walk more than a few slow steps without terrible pain — regardless of how many times her knee is replaced.  Yet I caution you not to expect a change in healthcare legislation that might damage the profit stream generated by those surgeries she’ll be receiving — even if making such a change would free up huge amounts of cash that would more than pay the cost of insuring those who presently can’t find coverage.  The power of that money is so intense that such change simply will not happen — regardless of how compelling the argument — or how enormous the benefit to the public.

Do you have a better word to describe such a system than corrupt?  Can you introduce me to one honest, reasonably intelligent person who thinks that spending a fortune on knee replacements for 94-year-olds is a good, fair-minded idea while others who happen not to be able to get health insurance face catastrophic health conditions to which their pitiable complaints will be turned a deaf ear?

I know that the vast majority of the many millions of people working in healthcare are honest, decent, and incredibly talented.  I know dozens of them personally, and I respect them deeply.  But the fact remains that the medical industry is in place to make money.  And if you happen to be one of the lucky ones (like our friend above) who benefits from that profit motive, I urge you to consider it a bonus for which you should be profoundly thankful — because not everyone is so lucky.

So as not to ignore the energy industry entirely in this post, it’s clear that a similar argument could be made here.  As I’ve pointed out, the oil industry alone employs seven lobbyists for each of the 535 members of Congress.  Do you think Big Oil would be spending those hundreds of millions of dollars if they weren’t buying something of far greater value in exchange ? Sorry to appear cynical, but I’m convinced that the level playing field we’ve discussed here so frequently will come about when and only when we’ve found a way to disconnect our lawmakers from the powerful interests that buy their votes.

Corporate lobbying is an institution that is causing more harm to more innocent people with each passing month.  What’s the matter with simply abolishing it?  The framers of the Constitution wisely built in the right of the people to redress their government, but I think it’s pretty clear that they didn’t intend this patent dishonesty that’s ripping our civilization and its people slowly and painfully apart.  What’s the harm in simply saying that money should not buy legislative influence?