Rock on, Rockerfellers

Since Enbridge cannot yet begin laying steel from Bruderheim to Kitimat via the Northern Gateway pipeline, it must content itself with laying irony by complaining about how groups opposing the pipeline project are being funded.

Here's an old political cartoon I found about the relationship 

between the Rockerfeller kingdom and the U.S. government. 

Change the names and the faces, and this looks a lot 

like Alberta today. Now, imagine a tiny squirt from this 

money hose, going to aid environmental research 

and lobbying. Enbridge apparantly has much to fear.

For my part, I'm neither for nor against Northern Gateway. As consumers, our opinions are pretty well irrelevant anyway; we live very well on the avails of massive energy use, and it's a pretty duplicitous consumer who wants to deny bringing more energy to market.

Politically, my vote for or against pipeline projects will never be asked, much less counted. So basically, what will happen, will happen. Besides, when have you ever heard of big corporations not getting what they want, especially when energy resources are concerned? 

The irony reported in the Advocate Tuesday, however, was so thick and rich, I almost pushed a spoonful of organic steel-cut oatmeal back through my nose laughing about it over breakfast.

The non-profit groups and think tanks pushing their campaigns against a bitumen pipeline through B.C. did not invent their tactics. They learned them from industry.

Setting up non-profit lobby groups, funded through back doors and third parties to make it harder to trace the money, was invented by industry to move public opinion and to grease the political processes of the industrial agenda. To accuse modern-day hippies dressed in their hemp underwear of doing the same thing – as if that were something bad – is perfectly laughable.

It's even more funny when you think about the evil places Enbridge says their money is coming from.

Dark money from the Rockerfeller Foundation? You've got to be kidding. That foundation got its billions from perfecting vertically-integrated monopolist control over the entire petroleum industry. In 1911, the American government forcibly broke the Rockerfeller kingdom – Standard Oil – into pieces, so there could be some free market competition in the oil biz again.

The Rockerfellers pushed free-market economies into evolving the anti-trust powers of government. Without those powers, companies like Enbridge would likely never have been able to come into existence today.

And today, the Rockerfeller Foundation, plus the charitable arms of the families that founded companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel and KING Broadcasting are putting little bits of their vast wealth into groups engaged in the exact same activities that industries use to get what they want.

Is Enbridge afraid that once people get some research money, they will uncover uncomfortable facts about pipeline megaprojects, and their real costs? Is having more information bad, or is it just bad when information cannot be filtered through one certain type of sieve?

In the end, all the oil in the world will eventually be burned. There is still room at the top of the income ladder for people who make it possible for all of us to burn it.

In the meantime, adapt or die, Enbridge. But don't make yourself look stupid by attempting to vilify the corporate barons who put a little money into groups doing the exact same enterprises the barons themselves invented.