One major problem the Obama administration has is that they are not doing proper “Messaging”. They aren’t getting the message out people want to hear, such as their taxes were cut last year and that they now have more spending money. It’s hard to imagine but many people don’t even apparently look at their pay checks. George W Bush when he cut taxes nine years ago decided to milk it for all the “political capital” it was worth. He sent out a personal letter to everybody announcing “Your income taxes have just been cut” along with a check for three hundred dollars right on the spot. Now it could be that some might now owe tax because they received this check, but still the message received is “George Bush is about putting money in your pocket”. Some will propagate the argument that the founding fathers favored rich people hanging on to their “hard earned money”. And yet the first millionaire in today’s dollars didn’t even exist as far as US citizens are concerned till 1793. That was the first millionaire. These people didn’t have all the “Old Money” that Europeans of the time had. And Thomas Jefferson wrote his cousin, James Madison, not the president but another, that while traveling in France he gave away a few coins to a pool peasant woman in the country and she was oh so grateful. Jefferson theorized that the rich who take land from the poor, should reimburse those poor people with a well paying job. Also Jefferson proposed something resembling a progressive tax to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. This is because Jefferson was basically an egalitarian. Contrast this with the “by the book” debating style we have from the tea baggers that KABC news commented on last night. The message is the same. Label yourself as “just a mother” or “just a working man” or whatever and label your opponent as a “carrier politician” and label all of his ideas as “risky and dangerous schemes” and always talk about the deficits the democrats mount up. Here’s a good line. Tell them that is the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire that our national deficit will be zero in five years. That’s what I’ve been told. We need to defuse this whole connection between democrats and deficits. Part of the problem is that Obama is an impulsive person. His decision to run in 2008 rather than to wait and mature a little was in itself an impulsive act. His passing of Health Care was an impulsive act. People perceive that their President is basically reading lines from a tele-prompter rather than exercising true, seasoned leadership, of the type that Lyndon Johnson, for example, might provide. The President has been derelict in addressing people’s basic economic fears.
Thom Hartman wrote a book called “The last hours of ancient sunlight”. Of course this is a book about oil. Back in the mid nineteenth century just before oil was discovered in 1859 in western Pennsylvania, there was talk then of an “energy crisis” and the reference here was a whale blubber people used for lighting fuel. Charles Dickens made reference to “dealing with the surplus population of England”. The earth had passed our first billion in population in 1830 and so it could be argued that without oil the planet could only support about a billion people comfortably. Of course oil is used not only for transportation but more importantly, for fertilizer to grow our food to feed all these people. Certainly oil is used in all of our modern plastics like MYLAR. Getting off of oil will be no easy feat. If we made hemp legal we could solve a lot of our problems, for instance, in paper production. But Thom Hartman points out that much of our oil is used in transportation. Today as long last we are finally seeing electric cars produced on a wide scale. The US can handle the power production with hydro-electric, and coal and other production. But if we didn’t have gasoline burning cars we could ease off of our oil addition. The planet has passed “peak oil production” and all of the new we find on the planet will be increasingly more expensive to retrieve. We should stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. It’s claimed that we sell them weapons so that the money we pay for their oil gets returned to us. But just think how many international problems would be solved tomorrow if we just had no use for their oil to begin with. You people know the drill. We adopt systems like in Europe with solar panels that cause our electric meters to run backwards so that we can sell out excess power back to the grid when it’s most in demand. This can be accomplished if we adjust our tax laws. The President hasn’t talked much on energy in terms that he actually intends to change the status quo. Nobody is expecting anything to be done in the next two years; that’s for sure. But there will come a time when we will need to address this growing long-term energy crisis. The population of the earth isn’t getting any smaller and it takes little imagination that a massive energy crisis is already upon us, and we are sticking our head in the sand.
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