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Conservative Pundit Accidentally Argues For Nationalizing Energy Industry [1]

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Date: 2022-09-14

Yesterday we talked about a Washington Examiner columnist's accidental argument in favor of conservatives fighting climate change and racism (so libs will stop using them as excuses for supposed failures) and it was so much fun we're going to do something similar today.

Because in its unceasing quest to prop up fossil fuel propaganda in its opinion pages, Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Sternberg has accidentally made a pretty good case for nationalizing the energy industry .

First he makes it clear that he's operating in disinfo-world, with the intro: "Let’s come right out and say it: Anyone who still thinks climate change is a greater threat than climate policy to financial stability deserves to be exiled to a peat-burning yurt in the wilderness."

Of course! Apparently the UK "may be facing" a "wave of business bankruptcies" and "the culprit is energy prices" which "are rising for British businesses in intervals of several hundred percent at a time and sometimes with steep deposit requirements from utilities that fear precisely a wave of bankruptcies."

German businesses are similarly feeling the pressure, and Sternberg worries that "the only politically viable solution for this winter will be subsidies on a monumental scale," which will require lots of government spending and borrowing which "adds up to an extraordinary threat to financial stability."

But if you're really worried about the size of the payments crashing the global financial market, as Sternberg is, then surely it would be cheaper to cut out the profit-driven entity, and instead of governments subsidizing businesses and people to pay utility bills, with the companies then reaping the profits of sky-high prices, the governments could instead just pay the lower, direct cost of producing the energy, cutting out the middlemen getting rich(er) off the energy price spikes resulting from Putin's war?

Perhaps that's something he wrote off as not politically viable, but hey, given how much conservatives love to say that domestic energy is a national security issue, and we need to frack to keep the country safe from foreign oil barons, then shouldn't those companies be nationalized, too?

Surely our national security is too important to trust to some "woke" oil company!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/14/2122787/-Conservative-Pundit-Accidentally-Argues-For-Nationalizing-Energy-Industry

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