80. A protester displays a teargas canister during clashes in Cairo January 28, 2011. President Hosni Mubarak sent troops and armoured cars onto the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities on Friday in an attempt to quell street fighting and mass protests demanding an end to his 30-year rule. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis
The teargas is made in the U.S.A. What a surprise.
By Nick Squires in Trapani, Sicily
They rise up high above the sun-scorched countryside, looking out over hilltop villages, palm trees, neatly-tended vineyards and olive groves.
But for all their promises of a clean, green future, Italy’s windfarms have now acquired a somewhat dirtier whiff - as the latest industry to be infiltrated by the country’s mobsters.
Attracted by the prospect of generous grants designed to boost the use of alternative energies, the so-called “eco Mafia” has begun fraudulently creaming off millions of euros from both the Italian government and the European Union.
And nowhere has the industry’s reputation become more tarnished than Sicily, where windmills now dot the horizon in Mafia strongholds like Corleone, the town better known as the setting for the Godfather films.
“Nothing earns more than a wind farm,” said Edoardo Zanchini, an environmental campaigner who has investigated Mafia infiltration of the industry. “Anything that creates wealth interests the Mafia.”
It is not just Italian criminals, however, who have spotted the potential for corruption. Recent research by Kroll, the international corporate security firm, has discovered examples all over Europe of so-called “clean energy” schemes being used to to line criminals’ pockets rather than save the planet. Some involve windmills that stand derelict or are simply never built, while others are used to launder profits from other crime enterprises.
“Renewable energy seems like a good thing, run by saintly people saving the world,” said Jason Wright, a senior director with Kroll, which performs background checks on renewable energy schemes on behalf of legitimate investors, and which has documented a sharp rise in the number of wind farms with suspect ownership.
“But a lot of people want to jump on board a sure-fire revenue spinner. I wouldn’t say the entire sector is corrupt, but there is a small percentage of corrupt projects.”
The level of fraud has prompted calls for tighter restrictions on the use of public money in funding renewable energy, for which EU bureaucrats have grand ambitions. Brussels has ordered all 27 EU nations to ensure that one-fifth of their energy is renewable by 2020, and in recent years has given out an average of €5 billion (£4.1 billion) annually in loans and grants. The levels of subsidy allow some wind farm owners to claim generous premiums for every watt of electricity they generate.
In Italy, for example, power from wind farms is sold at a guaranteed rate of €180 per kwh – the highest rate in the world. In a country where the Mafia has years of expertise at buying corrupt politicians and intimidating rivals, the result is perhaps inevitable, creating a new breed of entrepreneur known as the “lords of the wind”.
Around 30 wind farms have been built in Sicily, with another 60 planned, often to the anger of local people, who say they blight an otherwise picturesque landscape. Dino Leggio, 33, a barman in Corleone, claimed that many of the turbines that now dotted the island made money only for politicians and the Mafia.
“Nobody consulted ordinary people about putting up these huge great things,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “They are very tall, and very ugly. Before they start pumping millions of euros into wind farms, they should fix the roads, which are in a terrible state.”
While many of the wind farms in Sicily are in legitimate hands, some have already attracted the attention of the police. Last year, detectives launched a major investigation into suspicions that Mafia clans had colluded with corrupt businessmen and local politicians to secure control of a project to construct wind turbines in the Trapani area of western Sicily.
Eight people were arrested in Operation “Eolo”, named after Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of winds, on charges of bribing officials in the coastal town of Mazara del Vallo with gifts of luxury cars and individual bribes of €30,000-70,000.
Police wiretaps showed the extent of the Mafia’s infiltration of the wind energy sector when they intercepted an alleged Mafioso telling his wife: “Not one turbine blade will be built in Mazara unless I agree to it.”
In another operation last November, codenamed “Gone With the Wind”, 15 people were arrested on suspicion of trying to embezzle up to €30 million in EU funds. Among those arrested on fraud charges was the president of Italy’s National Wind Energy Association, Oreste Vigorito. He has not been convictued of an offence and denies any wrongdoing.
Further afield, scandals have emerged in Spain, Romania, Bulgaria and Corsica, among others. In one alleged scam on the Canary Islands, a mayor, five officials and two developers are fighting criminal charges that include abuse of office, bribery and misappropriation of land in an attempt to secure EU subsidies.
One case in Spain, meanwhile, involved a solar energy plant which claimed, miraculously, to be generating electricity at night. Investigators found that that the power was in fact being produced by diesel generators - the “green” subsidies paid for the plant were so generous that the owners still made a handsome profit.
As well as the prospect of fraudulent grant money, wind farms are also attractive to criminals seeking to invest money from illegal activities such as drug dealing, prostitution and illegal waste dumping. Some Mafia clans have illicitly secured licenses to build a wind farm and then sold them on to legitimate firms who have invested in good faith.
“Foreign investors are often not aware who they are dealing with,” said Mr Wright. “You start to be alarmed if the shareholders have a background in something like pizzerias.”
John Etherington, a former professor of ecology at the University of Wales and author of The Wind Farm Scam, said the industry was vulnerable to corruption because of poor regulation. The EU, which has an anti-fraud unit, currently has no criminal proceedings on any wind farm cases, insisting it is the responsibility of member states to monitor funding.
“It has been a matter of policy in the wind farm industry to make the financing of it both opaque and complicated,” said Mr Etherington. “In all countries across Europe the customer is not told how much they are paying for it, and the whole financing of the industry is coming out of subsidy on electricity generation.”
Despite the scandals over Mafia infiltration, there have been very few protests against wind farms in Italy. Instead, farmers have leapt at the chance to rent out their land for wind farm construction at a time when the price of agricultural produce such as grapes and tomatoes has plummeted.
“Why get up early every morning to work the land, and run the risk of not being able to sell your crops for a good price, when you can sit at home and take 10,000 euros a year in rent?” said Nicola Angelo, a Sicilian businessman. “People here have swallowed the idea of wind farms, even though they have ruined the landscape.”
But David Moss, a British building contractor based in the Sicilian hilltop town of Salemi, which is surrounded by whirring turbines, suggested that was not the only reason for the absence of wind-farm “Nimbyism”.
“In the UK, if a company proposed putting up 100 turbines across the countryside, there would be an uproar,” he said. “In Italy, everyone keeps quiet because they are afraid to stand up to the Mafia.”
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion of April 20, 2010 was a disaster for people located in or near the Gulf of Mexico. It outright killed 11 platform workers and seriously injured 17 others. It played havoc with the economic welfare of people in states stretching from Texas to Florida (none of which apart from Florida voted for Obama). But it was a great boon for socialists who like nothing more than to bash the free enterprise system.
For example, Thomas Frank in an utterly horrible and obscene Wall Street Journal article of June 2, 2010, entitled “Laissez Faire Meets the Oil Spill” stated: “And Galt only knows how many times ‘coziness’ of the MMS variety has been celebrated as part of the struggle for free markets and free people…. But things are different today. The catastrophe is too great to brush it off with the usual laissez-faire scholasticism. So the great debate must wait. We are all liberals for the duration.”
Well, here comes some “laissez-faire scholasticism.”
How did government socialism and state monopoly corporate capitalism together bring about this catastrophe before it occurred? Let me count the ways. It interfered with oil drilling in safer areas, for example, the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. An unholy alliance of dirigisme environmentalists, politicians and government bureaucrats have been attacking the Oil Sands in Alberta for lo these many years. This same cabal made it difficult to bring to market oil from shallow offshore in the Gulf of Mexico where it is safer, and pushed companies like BP out into deeper water, where harvesting is more difficult to control. Then, too, there were numerous restraints/prohibitions on exploration and delivery off of our east and west coasts.
The employees of the so-called government watchdog, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) were watching pornography on their computer screens instead of offering oversight. Their 582-page “Regional Oil Spill Response Plan – Gulf of Mexico” doesn’t even mention a deep-water oil spill; yet, this was imposed on BP by those porn fans. While the number of deep-water oil installations rose by 900% in the last 20 years, the number of MMS inspectors stayed the same. I do not suggest that we should have increased the size of government, only that even on its own grounds MMS has been a calamity. As well left-wing, environmental groups, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Environmental Protection Agency have long regulated this industry in a myriad of nanny state ways.
What was the reaction of the Obama administration after the fact, apart from whining, holding meetings, and casting blame at business for greed and profit seeking? First, our president for a long time refused to abandon the nefarious Jones act, which mandates that coastal shipping and all goods transported by water be carried in U.S.-flag ships constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens. Since that industry is heavily under the control of organized labor, this constituted a pay off to Obama’s union-boss buddies. But the reality is that the expertise in dealing with oil spills can be found mainly in Europe, not the U.S., and, particularly, with the Dutch, Belgians, and Norwegians. They offered to help, but the present administration dragged its heels in accepting it. Then there was the “15 parts per million” issue. Our unholy alliance of socialists and anti-market environmentalists managed to get a law passed forbidding the dumping of water in the Gulf which is dirtier than that level. The Dutch ships have the ability to scoop up sea water heavily infused with oil (thousands of parts per million) at the site of the Deepwater Horizon, treat it on board, and dump out far cleaner water with only some 200 parts per million (a quick and vast improvement). Would Obama allow this? For a long time he would not, relying on far less efficient U.S. unionized boats which had to travel great distances to get the dirty water treated onshore. Then, infamously, President Obama installed a moratorium on drilling; but all industrial initiatives are dangerous, and sometimes boomerang. Accidents occur in mines and factories, but we don’t close them down. Happily, though, courageous and heroic New Orleans Federal Judge Martin Feldman soon after lifted this ban.
What is Obama’s solution? It would appear to be yet more bashing of what is left of our once great and glorious free enterprise system, a call for more stringent government regulation, and a change in name from MMS to Bureau of Ocean Energy. Thus, more of the same of what got us into the mess in the first place, plus a band aid name change.
What suggestion emanates from market fundamentalists such as me? Why, to privatize the entire Gulf of Mexico, of course. Why? Because with private ownership, external costs would be internalized. Any owner of the Gulf would have been much more careful than the MMS, because he would have lost, wait for it, profits! Had the Mississippi river been in private hands, the corporate owner would have gone broke, and this property turned over to more capable hands in the advent of the Katrina tragedy. Instead, those responsible for killing some 1500 of our neighbors, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, are still in existence. This is in sharp contrast to BP, which of course, is (partially) responsible for this disaster. But, happily, based on free enterprise principles, that firm will suffer losses and even risk bankruptcy, unlike these statist institutions.
Ideally, users of the Gulf, its homesteaders, would become its owners. As a second best policy all those living within say, five miles of its coast, plus intensive users of its waters, would become stockholders in a new Gulf of Mexico Corporation. Take that, pinkos. If we learn anything from the study of economics, it is that private property rights systems, while far from perfect, function markedly better than their alternative, nonownership or government ownership.
September 6, 2010
Dr. Block [send him mail] is a professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans, and a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of 
Defending the Undefendable and Labor Economics From A Free Market Perspective. His latest book is The Privatization of Roads and Highways.
(Source: lewrockwell.com)
I don’t agree entirely with his point of view on this subject but, once you get past all the unnecessary capitalization of words, he makes some great valid points.
From GuardofLiberty:
That’s it. The “Tea Party” has got to go. They (very much like Objectivists, but much worse than even them) are making libertarians, anti-statists, and free maketeers (whatever you want to label folks like me) look bad, very bad. Put it simply, the “Tea Party” is NOT libertarian. Not in the slightest.
To be sure, Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty originally began promoting grassroots events called “Tea Parties” starting around Tax Day 2009. I would say that these original events were indeed, organized by people with liberty on their minds, however, as Ryan pointed out in two of his posts on Tumblr (here) and (here), the lack of organization and a united ideology set the stage for infiltration.
Conservatives, now alienated from the halls of power after the disaster of the Bush Administration, can no longer call or style themselves as being anything near him because of the anger and resentment associated with his regime (and rightfully so). So, to regain power they realized that they had to reinvent themselves, and thus hopped onto the Tea Party bandwagon, emphasizing “limited government” and other minarchist/constitutionalist language.
The result is the “Tea Party” that we see today- a clusterfuck of people that, as one of the articles (the second) I cited above points out, is more anti-Obama than pro-freedom. Now, to be pro-freedom it’s necessary that you be against Obama’s policies, but there’s the keyword: POLICIES. I hate Obama’s policies. I even think the guy himself can be a smug asshole at times, and at all times is a dolt. But I do not hate Barack Obama as a person. The “Tea Party” seem to hate him just for being him, and routinely strawman his positions while holding up stupid caricatures.
But wait, it seems that the “Tea Party” has expanded its operations. In the AOL article I linked to above, it details “Tea Partiers” favoring Arizona’s New Immigration Law. Now, I do not support Federal Action to overturn Arizona’s Law, but only because of Murray Rothbard’s principle that local affairs must be solved locally, not by a higher level of government, due to the fact that this only increases the power of the central state. In other words, I think Arizona’s Law sucks, but it is a matter to be resolved in Arizona, otherwise the Feds just get more powerful (and we see how that tends to turn out).
The “Tea Partiers” actually turned out to support Arizona’s Law in total. That means according to them, the state can just stop anyone and check if they have a permission slip to be in the arbitrary area known as “Arizona” or “The United States of America”. Doesn’t sound like “limited government” to me.
That’s because in fact the “Tea Party” is no longer a movement that supports such a thing, or anything remotely to do with the liberty movement (to me “limited government” is an oxymoron anyway). It has become simply a cesspool of conservatives trying to find ways back into power. They instead, believe in a “moral” state of national greatness. That is to say, they believe themselves to be the instruments to guide “America” back onto the “right” path that includes overseas empire, combined with strong nationalism at home and “moral” social values. This is what the Tea Party has become, disguised in libertarian rhetoric to get away from the stigma of the Bush regime, though it’s easy to see right through it.
This is why the “Tea Party” MUST go. It must be completely jettisoned from anything having remotely to do with libertarianism or the liberty movement (whether you be a minarchist or a complete free maketeer like I am). Libertarians must distance themselves from having ANYTHING to do with the “Tea Party.” It’s way past time to call them, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin (especially!), etc. out on their inconsistencies and garbage.
A new movement, akin to what Ryan outlined in his two posts must be started, particularly I believe, among my generation, as we stand to gain or lose the most. This movement must be truly revolutionary, not the back-and-forth that the “Tea Party” represents. Think of the “Tea Party” as a reaction to the “Change” slogan of before, but in style only. The new movement must be one of substance. More to come on that later.
There is a chance at real revolution in the world. People are dissatisfied perhaps as never before. Politicians of all stripes continue to fail them while the economy is showing more and more signs of a slowdown (Stocks are actually down for the year). This is a perfect recipe for revolutionary and systemic change.
We DO NOT NEED the “Tea Party” screwing this up, diluting the message of Liberty, and worse, making the Liberty movement look like Conservatives (and angry ones at that) to the less ideological masses, the ones who just want a peaceful and prosperous life and don’t care for politics, economics, or philosophy in depth.
