GREED AND FEAR IN THE GAS RUSH

With the possible exception of quantum physics and ice cream, I have come to believe that most of our world can be explained through the application of greed and fear.  There are many euphemisms that attempt to soften this reality.  The American social contract is based on the greed of economic success balanced by the fear of obeying the law.  Religions substitute gratitude for greed and the wrath of higher powers for fear.  Conservatives use capitalism for greed and socialism for fear; liberals: social leveling and the industrial, financial complex.  In the end, when the onion is peeled, it all comes down to wanting more and avoiding the taking away of what we, as individuals, find valuable.

 Stock market sages understand the dynamic.  If you study how greed and fear motivate people, you can always buy low and sell high.  It is also the basic principle of every totalitarian regime that has ever established a dictatorship.  Promise a majority of the people economic prosperity and have them fear the tribe or religion or country across the river.  The truth is that understanding greed and fear gives you power over others.

Nothing highlights human nature’s reliance on greed and fear like a good old fashion gold rush.  Make no mistake Washington County and the Marcellus shale belt, are in the middle of such an event. Here, the greed is simple to define.  Fortunes are made at the stroke of a pen. Drillers provide jobs, revenue and instant cash for access to public parks and recreation areas.  Economic booms are good for business and guarantee reelections

Fear is also everywhere, once we look behind the drillers’ billboards and commercials, telling us they are our benevolent friends:  “Sign now or be left behind.”  “Pass that regulation and we will sue and/or take our business to the next county or the next State.”  On the other side of the equation: “The science on fracking is incomplete.”  “Our water table is in danger.”  “The drillers will be gone and our beautiful County a wasteland.”

The greed and fear associated with whether to drill, is pitting individuals against families, families against towns, municipalities against counties, counties against the State, and State against State.  The drilling industry loves Pennsylvania.  To use a bad pun, a fractured political system is good for fracking.  The industry is running into reasonable checks and balances in smaller homogeneous States like New Jersey and Maryland. These Sates are more than happy to let Pennsylvania be the guinea pig so that all the problems are not repeated in their own backyards.

The present system in Pennsylvania favors the drillers.  They understand greed and fear.  The business model is to divide and conquer.  Like any good stock trader or dictator, this gives them power to achieve their goals. Exxon used the same formulae when fear and greed ran the oil industry.  Desert Bedouins understood the fear and greed game better than the oil men.  They have been playing it for centuries.  They formed OPEC and made the oil companies their employees, not their masters.

With all the recent talk about regionalization of economic, social and political concerns (the Power of 32 initiative among others) you would think that forming a Marcellus Shale Cartel that cuts across state lines would be a no brainer.  It would be the only game in town for the drillers.  They would have to come to the Cartel with hat in hand.  All environmental, tax and regulatory concerns could be vetted before the action starts. Public trust funds could be set up to repair infrastructure and address unforeseen pollution issues.

Such a plan would undoubtedly bring to the surface the greed and fear that public officials have in relinquishing local power.  My bet is that if Bedouin Chiefs that have fought each other for centuries could do it, so could our own political leaders.

A SNAPSHOT OF SKEWED VALUES

When I stand back and take stock of our political culture it often appears counter intuitive and irrational.  Let’s start with conservative Americans who need accessible education, healthcare and employment. Why would they support the tea party and rant against taxes and government programs which seek to provide these needed benefits?  On the other end of the spectrum, unionists,  members of academe and the children of our elite, sprinkled with old sixties protesters and young anarchists, camp out on Wall Street to protest the bailing out of banks.  In effect the “occupy wall street” crowd is supporting the very same tea party members who have suffered the most from the non recovery. Yet these conservatives want to leave the bankers unregulated and unscathed. 

Billionaires ask to have their taxes raised and are finding ways to give away their wealth.    Conservatives of modest means ask to have the taxes of the wealthy remain the same or lowered.  The tea party middle class have become our Herbert Hover libertarians.  The wealthy and the children of the last “me generation” are the new social democrats.

President Obama is a liberal democrat compelled to conduct his presidency as a fiscal moderate because of the state of the economy and the perceived need to move to the right for his reelection.  This is to capture more of the ground vacated by moderate republican candidates.  Mitt Romney is a moderate republican candidate who has made a Faustian bargain to become president. He has disavowed his long held policy positions.  This permits him to make a primary run as a conservative tea party libertarian in order to win his party’s nomination.  At another time and place Mr. Romney could easily serve on the President’s cabinet.

As an example of our social culture also gone whacky, we have the Steve Jobs phenomena.  Mr. Jobs was a genius at producing consumer products that by his own admission, no one knew they needed until he produced them.  His consumer consumption company is bigger than Exxon but employs very few Americans.  He was not a particularly nice man, but knew how to design and market millions of computers, music players, mobile phones and tablets.

Following his death, more media has been dedicated to Mr. Jobs life and times than any individual I can remember.  My entire issue of Business Week and much of Time magazine was dedicated to Mr. Jobs.  I learned nothing about the euro crisis and a lot about his volatile temper and that he considered taking LSD one of the most important decisions of his life.

Unfortunately lives well lived that I do care about receive almost no attention from the media.  Tony Judt was such an individual.  When he died in his early sixties from Lou Gehrig’s disease in August of 2010, the world blinked and carried on.  A politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual, Mr. Judt cared about people and about learning from history to make the world a better place. My bet is that years from now, his writings will carry more weight than the iphone.

Our political and social culture says a great deal about who we are as a people. When did our political leaders stop caring about what they believe and only about getting elected?  What’s wrong with Obama being a one term “progressive values” president or Romney running in the moderate republican tradition?   When did we stop caring about educating our children so they could compete on a level playing field as an essential part of the American dream?  How did our empathy for the less fortunate shift to the prevailing need to accumulate things, including the newest electronic toys?  Why should our culture worship Steven Jobs?

 Sometimes I cannot tell whether it is simply the media tail wagging the public dog, deciding what we think and read, or whether our values really are skewed.  Maybe it’s a bit of both.