Posted on 06/02/2008 1:08:43 PM PDT by Victory111
In what has become an annual ritual, the wizards of Congress are going after the leaders of Big Oil again. This is political theater at its most cynical. It’s the modern version of the Salem witch hunt. The rapid rise of gasoline to $4 per gallon is a pain in the patootie, and somebody needs to be blamed, but why blame the American oil companies?
I wonder if we might get their attention if several million folks sent a message such as this one to their legislators. And given the $$$$ the Middle East potentates surreptitiously funnel into our political campaigns, it will TAKE millions!
It’s NOW time – PAST TIME — to do the following things to break our dependence on FOREIGN supplies for our URGENT energy needs:
1. SPEED the permitting and construction of NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS HERE. If France can safely generate 80% of THEIR needs with nukes, what’s OUR problem?
2. Immediately begin safe and ecologically sensitive drilling of the MASSIVE U.S. OIL SHALE DEPOSITS (Bakken Formation and others) and our off-shore coastal regions.
3. Immediately ease the permitting of NEW REFINERIES HERE (ecologically sensitive, of course.)
4. Halt the IDIOTIC CORN ETHANOL based fuel program. It may be popular with agribusiness legislators and their pals BUT it is a NET ENERGY LOSER (more units IN than come OUT – DUUUHHHHH!) This goofy program is – along with the oil situation – killing Americans on food prices but ACTUALLY killing FOLKS in other parts of the world. And THAT’S not only STUPID — it’s IMMORAL.
And here’s a REAL benefit American families can understand: Once we’re no longer dependent on oil from the Middle East, we can bring our troops home and let those folks go back to doing what they’ve honed into an art form over their several thousand year history – killing one another instead of OUR boys and girls. Heck, once we’re out of there, they might even get along for a few decades.
If Congress insists on persecuting CEO’s for making profits by providing a service people need, why not Congressional hearings to grill CEO’s of Managed Care Orgs for making outrageous profits in DENYING services people need? Just a thought ...
I got an e-mail from MA Congressman Ed Malarky about evil oil. It’s not “foreign oil” any more.
They need to be going after the leaders of not Big Oil but rather Big Fed who is devaluing the dollar.
Read this and I think you will agree the oil industry has already been Nationalized in the US;
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
This is exactly the plan the Pubs need to promote if they wish to be swept into power in Congress once again:
1. SPEED the permitting and construction of NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS HERE. If France can safely generate 80% of THEIR needs with nukes, what’s OUR problem?
2. Immediately begin safe and ecologically sensitive drilling of the MASSIVE U.S. OIL SHALE DEPOSITS (Bakken Formation and others) and our off-shore coastal regions.
3. Immediately ease the permitting of NEW REFINERIES HERE (ecologically sensitive, of course.)
4. Halt the IDIOTIC CORN ETHANOL based fuel program.
We could send thank you cards to Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne,CSN and all the other musicians/self proclaimed energy experts who have erroneously demonized energy companies and driven up energy costs by blocking nuclear power and denouncing updating and building refineries. These musicians are as responsible for high gas prices as anyone.
>>I wonder if we might get their attention if several million folks sent a message such as this one to their legislators.>>
Nope. Tried it with NAFTA, didn’t work. National votes don’t count, their fixes are in. Local and county votes still matter, depending on who counts them. Reality.
I agree with those points exactly, although I do think it would be a good idea to keep searching for an alternative fuel that we can use with cars and machines one day to take the place of oil since it seems that we’ve already drilled most of the oil that is cheap and easy to drill (not to mention the possibility of one day running out of oil).
No, we've drilled most of the oil that the government hasn't placed off limits to appease the environazis.
“but why blame the american oil companies ?”
because that’s what american liberals do best. they villify americans engaging in free enterprise.
I have one.
While all the building of facilities takes place, place a 5 year moratorium on boutique blends of gasoline.
“t’s NOW time – PAST TIME — to do the following things to break our dependence on FOREIGN supplies for our URGENT energy needs:
1. SPEED the permitting and construction of NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS HERE. If France can safely generate 80% of THEIR needs with nukes, what’s OUR problem?
2. Immediately begin safe and ecologically sensitive drilling of the MASSIVE U.S. OIL SHALE DEPOSITS (Bakken Formation and others) and our off-shore coastal regions.
3. Immediately ease the permitting of NEW REFINERIES HERE (ecologically sensitive, of course.)
4. Halt the IDIOTIC CORN ETHANOL based fuel program. It may be popular with agribusiness legislators and their pals BUT it is a NET ENERGY LOSER (more units IN than come OUT – DUUUHHHHH!) This goofy program is – along with the oil situation – killing Americans on food prices but ACTUALLY killing FOLKS in other parts of the world. And THAT’S not only STUPID — it’s IMMORAL.”
This is the most IMPORTANT post of the DECADE.
We own them through stock in our 401K's and pension funds.Their profits are our profits.
Their profits allow them to provide a large number of Americans with jobs,medical benefits and retirement benefits.
Point taken, but someday oil, like any other finite resource, is going to run out. Seems like a good idea to start thinking of products to replace it, even if they aren’t needed for decades.
Thanks.
If any who see this feel the same way, START RAISING HELL WITH THE $#@!& IN MALFUNCTION JUNCTION...STARTING WITH JOE LOSERMAN AND WARNER who are sponsoring one of the most irresponsible bills this decade.
why blame the American oil companies?
Because they are where you and I pay the money, so the politicians think we will resent the oilcos. But the oilcos are the ones who want to drill in ANWR and offshore, and the politicians are the ones who prevent it.If you think gas is expensive as a gas station, try buying it anywhere else! The gas stations and the oil companies are the only ones holding the price of gas down as low as it is.
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