This Page Unintentionally Left Blank.

The precepts of "State Capitalism and Freidman" reminded me of the absurd statement, occasionally still read on corporate documents, that states, "This Page Intentionally Left Blank", which is one of my favorite examples of corporate-speak, as it does what corporations do best: lies to your face. But corporate-speak isn't satisfied to only tell lies, it compounds the falsehood by stating the exact opposite of what is true. The referenced page, always having been intentionally written on so as to inform you of what reality was before they changed it, by which time, the reality they so strongly present to you, has been altered, such that what they insist is true is now, precisely because of their mindless, faceless corporate actions, obviously not true.

In the interplay of the triple-E's of modern societies: Energy, Economics, and Environment, there is a veritable cornucopia of pages intentionally left blank, yet the only person who's actually made a film in an attempt to point that out, Jeff Gibbs, has been more or less vilified for pointing out in his documentary, Planet of the Humans, what I said a dozen years ago: As we pretend that "doing Something" about climate change is better than the status quo, none of the steps we have taken to do so have been investigated to see if they are having the decidedly opposite effect: instead of ameliorating the problem, they are compounding it. 

There is no better example of this than the US corn for ethanol program. Whereas most people consider farming or agriculture to have to do with the growing of food, the definition of neither of them mentions the word: 

"The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of livestock; tillage; husbandry; farming."

Think cotton. And now, corn.

Which is subsidized by billions and billions of dollars funneled to the large agri-businesses (which are basically GSE's, much like all corporate conglomerates ... just take your pick: Big Pharma, Aerospace, Walled St, SillyCon Valley, the Auto Industry, Big Steal, all are products of Central Planning and Federal subsidization, so you can add any of the energy industries to that list, whether it be Big Coal, Big Oil, or NatGas and the related LNG industry, not to mention, but I will, Solar, Wind, Hydro, and Nuclear), yet we brag about the USA's supposedly "free-enterprise system", ignoring that the term has been so distorted that it means that the only thing any of these enterprises are free from is any risk for the corporations that run them, while what the ethanol production was mostly free from was markets, until the federal government stepped in and mandated them. Now that's what I call a free market, it's simply created out of thin air and then just handed over to you, since there's absolutely no demand for what you're producing. US State Capitalism, on as large a scale as any Communist country's State Capitalist organizations, not only sanctioned, but instigated by the so-called "Free-market" (in that they didn't have to pay a nickel to obtain it) the corn-to-ethanol program to create a product for which there was no demand, that destroyed vast swaths of prairies, releasing their large stores of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process ... CO2 that was conveniently not included in the ad campaign used to sell the concept to a naïve public. Ethanol from corn was advocated by the GW Bush administration, which then instituted it at a great cost to the American public and the environment, thus insuring the plunge into poverty of some of their staunchest supporters along the US Gulf coast, as the runoff from the intensive fertilization of the plains get carried down the Mississippi and engulfs the gulf with nitrogen-rich waters, giving growth to algae that rapidly depletes the waters of oxygen, killing off the shrimp that so many family-run businesses had for generation depended upon for their livelihoods. An economic Dead Zone to correlate with the dead zone that food-for-fuel has created in the waters of the Gulf. And, considering the color of algae, it can claim that all that death and destruction is Green! So, of course, as Martha Stewart would say, "It's good thing".

This is a misapplication of Energy in Economics that distorts the Environment so egregiously that an entire industry is wiped out, yet, because of the lack of any responsibility for the externalities of industry, the EROI of ethanol can still be, or rather, is still, despite the fallacy of not including the energy costs of externalities, cited as 1:1 ... a bad enough ratio as it stands.

What's EROI, you ask? Energy Returned on Investment. For oil, during its heyday in the US, peaking in 1965, it was 30:1, it has since declined by 2/3's to 10:1, and that was before fracking took over oil production in the US, since which time it has fallen further. Simultaneously with this decline in the EROI (which varies markedly from one country to the other, such that Canada's, which relies on the energy-intensive, and thereby environmentally disastrous, tar sands, it is closer to 4:1) of US oil, the energy intensity of its mobile fleet of personal ICE machines has close to doubled, such that the transport sector, in which employees drive themselves around in circles on a daily basis, has needed to consume more fuel (for those who forget, the slogan behind the food-for-fuel campaign claimed it would ensure US Energy Independence) to do the completely unnecessary work of hauling around twice the tonnage to carry its lone passenger than was required when EROI was 30:1: burning twice the fuel to do the exact same job of driving around in circles to meet employer expectations, which are completely unhinged from the damage they do, since that damage need never be entered onto corporate ledgers of profits and loss. But the loss is still there: it's just that instead of the corporations, we're the fools eating it. While countless others aren't eating at all ...  but what do we care about that? Our desire to haul around three tons of glass and metal with us everywhere we go surely outweighs their selfish demand for nutrition. Worse than Marie Antoinette, an entire country punks the hungry and simply laughs, while it quips, "Let them eat my dust." All so that automobiles' insatiable thirst for fuel, and politicians' voracious hunger for graft, can be quenched.