Kill the Greasy Market Economy Ideologue Conspirators by Edwin Young

Kill the Greasy Market Economy Ideologue Conspirators:
Give Obama’s Government and Stimulus Package a Chance
by Edwin L. Young, PhD

CBS’s 60 Minutes was explaining, Sunday 1/11/2009, the extreme and sudden rise and fall of oil prices and gasoline. The show blamed it on Enron and a burgeoning group of commodities’ speculators, brokerage firms, and hedge funds. Of course at the beginning of the oil price rise, the oil companies blamed it on supply and demand and the shortage of oil refineries. These guys said it would take almost a decade to build new refineries to meet the demand. Now Enron was over ten years ago and no new refineries have been built and oil and gas prices are near what they were pre-Enron and China, India, and the rest of the world, we hear, have slowing economies like the US. Well, slow economies or not, while people may not be buying cars, people are still driving the huge number of cars they bought when their economies were booming, up to just six months ago, and oddly, in the midst of the current bust, people are not rushing to buy hybrid cars. Nevertheless, oil and gasoline prices plunged just as Obama gets elected and the US and the world are, politically, pushing for green cars and energy. Well, if you were big oil and you were about to go out of business because politics, not the market forces, is forcing the change to green energy and cars, would you not find a way to make oil price plunge so short-sighted auto consumers would stick with the gas guzzlers? Of course you would. Jack Welch, ex CEO of General Electric, this morning (I am no fan of Welch or GE) was proposing a high gasoline tax (a major governmental intervention strategy) to smooth the way for the new breed of hybrid cars Detroit is coming out with. If these green cars do not capture the market, Detroit goes under and the massive interconnected auto related industries go with it. Welch’s idea, coupled with the new hybrid cars and T. Boone Pickens’ wind energy proposal, would shove big oil under the bus. It is a battle of giants and if big oil wins, the earth loses and the future for peace in a world that would be fiercely competing for that oil is gloomy. The era of worship of ‘market economy’ and denigration of government intervention must end. Only a groundswell of the same people who put Obama in office by a landslide can prevent big oil and its opportunistic advocate, the servile mainstream media industry, from winning at the expense of the entire planet. Write your legislators and flood the blogosphere with pleas to support the Obama green oriented stimulus initiative along with an exorbitant gas tax. Only a people’s majority can defeat the power of the international big oil corporate feudal state.