10/28/2004
This was my father's favorite saying. He said it over and over again in 1979 when the price of gas went from 70 cents a gallon to up over a dollar and we had to wait in gas lines on odd and even days. He would have said it over and over again had he been alive to witness Enron managers looting California (and laughing about it on tape), prescription-drug makers gouging the sick and the oil and gas companies of 2004 pulling the same old tricks they pulled in the 70s.
In addition to repeating "We the people get what we deserve," Dad would be insisting that if as many Americans as were able to quit buying gasoline for just two weeks, the price would come down, way down. And he would be right, gasoline would become cheaper, futures markets and China's and India's growing demand for oil be damned.
I've never heard anyone else say that, certainly not any of our nation's leaders. We can easily guess why George W. Bush doesn't call for a national wear-more-warm-clothes-use-less-heat campaign this winter to screw over the fuel companies. But Mr. Kerry, friend of the working and middle classes, doesn't either. He's against extracting fuel from national parks at a time when nature may already be a luxury we can no longer afford (1).
Kerry may get support from more lawyers than he does from MBA's, but he, too, is a friend--if unwittingly--of big oil. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton don't call for any cutbacks in consumption to drive down prices, neither do Ben Affleck or the Dixie Chicks. Rush Limbaugh talks about all the poor pharmaceutical workers in New Jersey who would get laid off if the gates were open to cheaper imports. Funny, he didn't worry about any getting laid off after he was busted for oxycontin.
We the people don't even know who the villains are. Yes, Islamic terrorists are a big threat to civilization, but they are the second biggest threat. The biggest threats are businesspeople, the professional-manager types who are now running almost everything, not only widget factories but schools, non-profits and churches as well. The professional managers' theology of market forces without personal responsibility and employees-as-commodities to be exploited and discarded is far more insidious than anything Allah and his prophet could dish out. Thank God--who is not Allah--the pope doesn't have an MBA!
(1) While we're developing fuel cell technology, we need to pump the parks, so Exxon won't have any excuses.
Copyright © 2004, 2008 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.