electricland

I thought this post by Mark Schmitt (via poorman_rss) was interesting: Pump and Dump Politics.

He's talking about Bill Frist's insider trading, and the culture that it seems to exemplify:

Investors as well as executives don't look at a company as something to build for the long term; they need to beat their numbers in the current quarter. And for the most part they assume that by the time things get tough, they'll be out. The insiders will bail out before the suckers; the CEO will move on to some other company. Or, if worst comes to worst, he'll retire with a nice package guaranteeing health care, use of the company plane for life, and a nice package of stock to sell when someone else turns the company around.

...

And what is our political culture except another version of pump and dump? Everything from war to tax policy to energy policy to the Medicare bill is a short-term effort to boost the president's political stock, with the long-term costs left to some bigger sucker.

I have nothing really to add to this, but it did spark some mildly connected thoughts: 1. Everyone should read or watch The Corporation. 2. It's an interesting corporate-governance issue. Recently in Canada, institutional investors like the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (which with $88 billion in assets is a force to be reckoned with) have been flexing their muscles and demanding better governance, better accountability, better citizenship etc. Is this going on in the States at all? 3. It occurs to me that this could be taken as yet another government-should-get-out-of-the-market notion, which it isn't at all. I'm always thrilled when institutional investors play the heavy, but that's just a nice complement to regulation and enforcement, not really a substitute for them.

Via gristmill_rss, linking for convenience because I haven't really had time to read it yet: Save energy, build more efficient cities.

On energy efficiency in the U.S., and why you may not be seeing it any time soon.

"Our dependence on foreign oil is like a foreign tax on the American dream. And that tax is growing every year," Bush said. "My administration is doing all we can to help ease the problem."

...by drilling for oil in good all-American locations like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So I don't see why Dave titled the post "Cognitive Dissonance". There is no dissonance here, move along.

*sigh*