Lies and the Lying Liars Who Shit All Over Us

(Via Mark Morford)

Oh my God do they ever lie.

All of them: Big Auto, Big Oil, BushCo, Pennzoil and Havoline and Saudi Arabia and crusty Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and the oil lobbyists and lackey scientists working for the Department of Energy and all the rest, on down the line and right up to your garage door.

Lie lie lie lie lie like evil little ratdogs because they are, after all, corporate greedmonkeys and war profiteers and duplicitous oil-sucking cretins (is that too polite?) who would eat their own mother's heart for a notable uptick in share/barrel price. Nevertheless, it's always a bit of a jolt when you see it all up close and personal and they basically rub it in your face.

Just look. Look over here. It's a new sports car. It's a new sports car that looks deliciously like a Lotus Elise and reportedly drives like Michael Schumacher's wet dream and goes from zero to 60 in about four seconds with so much torque and freakishly instantaneous power it makes the gods swoon.

This car, it has a top speed of 130 mph. It has a range of 250 miles. It also has GPS navigation and air-conditioning and air bags and it surely will come with a very badass sound system. It has heated seats and (I presume) iPod integration and Bluetooth. You know, just like a real car.

Oh, and by the way, this car? It's completely silent. It is 100-percent emissions-free. Doesn't even have a tailpipe. Because it has no internal combustion engine of any kind.

It's not a hybrid. It's pure electric, powered by a "3-phase, 4-pole AC induction motor," which I'm sure is rather impressive if you know what the hell it means. But it means one thing for certain: The only oil in this car is in the buffing fluid for the leather seats.

(SNIP)

See, they lie. And they've been lying for years, decades. They lie about how difficult it is to replace the internal combustion engine. They lie about how unfeasible it is to eliminate auto emissions without sacrificing real performance (the 130-mph Roadster's lithium-ion battery system is estimated to be twice as efficient as a Prius and three times as efficient as a hydrogen fuel cell).

But they lie, most of all, about how much we still require foreign oil, because these billion-dollar corporations claim they can't possibly afford to develop sufficiently advanced technology in your lifetime to create a 100-percent emissions-free, oil-free, ultragreen vehicle that still has all the comforts and performance of a regular car.

(SNIP)

I know, it's not exactly a new story. Just go see "Who Killed the Electric Car?" for proof of how corporate greed eats innovation like so many CornNuts. Then go see "An Inconvenient Truth" for a story of brutal denial and sheer idiocy among the political and corporate elite. Then rent "The Corporation" to see how social responsibility ranks right up there with modest golden parachutes on the list of U.S. corporate values (though that may finally be changing, given the undeniable business woes caused by global warming). Voilà America in a nutshell.

Mark hits the nail right on its corrupt and pathological little head. As long as these corporations can squeeze a few more bucks out of us, and as long as they control the government, any chance of changing these oilguzzling, environment destroying anachronisms is pretty small. Innovationn and change are crushed, and we slide further down the slippery slope of disaster and destruction. It's time to throw the bums out, and that is going to take all of us getting knowledgeable and determined enough to change the way this fucked up system works.

In other words, screw the monoliths; enthrall the wealthy individual enthusiasts first, sex up the media with cool pictures and dazzling performance, prove you can make serious profits with green technology and the big corporations will have to follow.

Sure, why not? Why couldn't the Roadster's ideal combo of sexiness and performance and entrepreneurial grit trickle down to the consumer mind-set and generate some fanatical buzz, force some change, help take us back to a culture where true innovation and radical thinking aren't considered a threat (sorry, GOP) but rather the mark of a vital and thriving country?