Is Obama Talking White or Selling Out?

by Joe Dukes

Well, Senator Obama. It’s game time. And the big boys have called you out to play. But this is the general election and the stakes are higher than any time in history. This time it’s much more than a game. And your glove size is reduced.

During this past week the race for the White House shifted into high gear when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared together in Unity, New Hampshire to kick off what is apparently going to be a “Unity” tour for the Democratic Party nominee and his surrogates. He immediately announced that he is “opting” out of the public campaign finance system for the election.

Then, John McCain immediately made an issue of the announcement. Obama had made a pledge back before he amassed his hefty lead in private contributions that he would participate in the federal program. Of course, McCain is going to use the system and the agreement had been made between all three dominant candidates.

The agreement was made when everyone thought Obama had no chance against the Clinton Machine and McCain was having real finance problems also. McCain’s claim is simply that if he can’t trust Obama on an issue as simple and basic as this, then how can you trust him to be your President? That’s punch number one and absolutely valid.

Enter Ralph Nader. Yes, that’s right, Ralph Nader. Nader has never been one to mince words and has been physically refused participation in previous Presidential debates. One in particular was when he was invited by the news network who was presenting an event, but the corporate sponsors of the event had instructed the local police to restrain him at the entrance point. It is well documented on YouTube for those who are interested.

It was pretty obvious that someone did not want him speaking on behalf of the Constitution, civil liberties, and, of course, against corporate power. It is also an illegal employment of the local police department. And the police responded to the sponsor instead of upholding the Constitution that they are sworn to protect. Seems a bit inverted, don’t ya’ think?

I submit that it is America’s number one problem… government/corporate inversion, or socialism via Corporatism. Our Congress is bought and paid for by the “white power block” and when you do what they expect  and then tell them what they want to hear you are “talking white.” The last time that I checked the Constitution it said that Congress works for us, not the other way around as it is today.

What actually happened when Nader addressed the situation was that he suggested Obama was “talking white.” According to Nader’s press release today, the phrase means to tell the white ruling class of Corporate America and the international Anglosphere what they want to hear instead of calling them out on the damage they are doing to the United States. The USA  belongs to the disenfranchised as well as the uber obscenely wealthy, who can’t seem to get fat enough.  And Nader is sick of the rhetoric just like McCain.

Nader suggests that if Obama has championed grassroots causes in the Chicago area, then what is he going to DO for the disenfranchised of all of America’s cities. Chicago is easily a model for the remainder of Urban America and the problems for the African-American community are all urban problems. As Dennis Hopper says, “If you want to experience the American Dream, you gotta have a plan, man!”

Of course, what happened was that the corporate approved national racial pundits jumped like bullfrogs going for a lily pad. The whole pond was filled with the sound of “ribet,” or shall I say “racist?” I heard the word more than once. And the mainstream media was overjoyed to allow them all of the air time they wanted. They allowed Nader to respond with precious little, but his website addressed the issue pronto.

I am of the notion that we have much deeper problems in this country than any sect getting angry anytime someone, especially a white person, makes a statement that is even tangential to a racist remark, whether or not it is in context. Our social problems are way beyond black and white. They are less and less about black and white and more and more about rich and poor. And Nader wants the substance NOW because he knows that the oligarchic duopoly is making plans NOW to exclude him from the debates once again.

Let me suggest a scenario. Much has been made of the Obama/Clinton meetings during the past two weeks. Clinton is going to persuade her “people” to support Obama, both electorally and financially. Clinton and her husband, the former President Clinton, will campaign for Obama. The extra financing from Clinton’s supporters will give Obama ample resources to run without public financing, claiming rhetorically to be the champion of the people, after he has double crossed John McCain on the national financing issue.

Meanwhile the networks will start setting up the debates as Nader is attempting to qualify for the ballots in all fifty states as an independent, beholden to no one. And because he is not obligated to the “white power block” they will attempt to shut him out to control the election issues.

Corporate America always hedges its bets on both sides of the political isle, making the Democrats and the Republicans two versions of the same thing, which is professional career-minded politicians operating in full utility maximization mode. The only difference is the way they attempt to have themselves perceived. In the end, money always wins. And unless something drastic breaks in the Senate, Congress will be impassable again.

Neither candidate wants to debate Nader because he will bring issues into the discussion that the candidates do not want to discuss. His Socratic Dialectic is as sound as anyone’s, which makes the alternate candidates look less than genuine if they do not agree. He’s not referred to as “The Gadfly” for nothing.

And Corporate America can’t bribe him like the others (and a system of bribery is what it is) when he is running as an independent candidate void of what the Federalist Papers refer to as tops on the list of evils in terms of factions in a republic form of government, that being political parties. Every time they get a toe hold on power, ego and greed will always intervene. And, if the electorate is lazy or voter apathy is high, their perceptive grip gets worse.

Let me suggest one more scenario. The debates will likely be presented by NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News, and possibly, CBS and C-Span. The NBC Networks are owned by General Electric, the world’s largest corporation. They also receive more government contracts than any other. You may have to discount Blackwater, Bechtel, and Halliburton for the time being. ABC is owned by Disney, another of the worlds largest corporations. If I am not mistaken CNN is owned by Time-Warner, which is one of the cable companies that provides financing for C-Span.

Fox News, which is functionally a Republican 527 organization, is of course owned by maverick Rupert Murdoch and CBS, I believe, is an independent company. I may be mistaken about them. MSNBC is the Obama functional 527 counterpart to Fox News. They just plumb hate each other. At least it allows for some continual comedy on Countdown. And, oh by the way, they all operate out of the state of New York and guess who is their Senator.

It was suggested to me while I was doing my graduate work in Public Administration by a national board member for the Society of Professional Journalists that the boards of these corporations are interlocked. I know for a fact, having been an employee of GE as far back as 1976, that they operate in what may be an illegal arrangement. Our largest customers were Sylvania, Westinghouse, and Emerson Electric. Instead of competing against them, we co-opted with them.

This has been an intense issue in mainstream media  for the past ten years. If the boards are interlocked, do the networks co-op? Isn’t the purpose of the free market system to actually compete against each other in order to let the market bare what it will? And if they are sharing information, can they control information or basically manage the news? Isn’t that the same business model as OPEC?

Of course, the real problem with this is that the companies run the networks and the boards run the companies. And a large part of the American electorate gets their information from traditional news formats instead of utilizing the internet as many of us do. Many Americans live in a bit of an entertainment vacuum and get spoon-fed their news via the Great American One-Eyed Electronic Hypnotizer.

So, it appears that both McCain and Nader have struck a nerve with the Obama campaign and he will now have to move to a substantive discussion and explain his position shifts since he secured the Democratic nomination. For McCain, his problems appear to be from his lobbyist connections and for Nader, it appears to be the amount of coverage that the national media is going to allow.

I would expect that we will see a major writing campaign come from the Nader campaign in the very near future. The internet has been an alternate media form before this election, but the power of the technology could be poised to make an impact like never seen before, especially in discussion of the suppression of national issues.

One thing is for sure. The system of corporate influence and the monopoly of the duopoly have been served notice. Nader is back and maybe stronger than ever. America is watching. America is reading. And soon, America will be voting. It looks to be one for the ages. Happy “Independent’s” Day everyone.

Gas Prices; Open Market or Open Manipulation?

by Joe Dukes

The price of gasoline has come front and center on the U.S. economic landscape in the past two years and Congress is finally acting like they want to do something about it. Actually, legislative action began in April of 2006 addressing the idea that price gouging has been occurring for quite some time. The truth is that it has and they have known it all along.

A large component of the pricing mechanism involves speculation. Of course, when there is speculation, there is futures trading. Futures trading is not altogether a bad thing. It is normally thought that futures trading, through the New York Mercantile Board, is standard business. A traditional futures trading operation is under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC. However, for the trading of oil there is no oversight. It occurs, “over the counter,” outside of the authority of the federal government.

There are a couple of problems with this arrangement. One problem is that in most commodities trading, as in food, when the laws of supply and demand are calculated, the price goes either up or down. The whole purpose of futures marketing is to get a stable variable on a needed input. The problem is that in the gas market, there is no consideration for the price going down. Very few investors are selling. Everyone is buying, on some level. And, with no oversight, there is no way to tell how many players are involved and who they are. Furthermore, there is no risk. The price is only moving in one direction. An example of this is when we see the price go down, it only goes down by a small amount. When it goes up, it goes through the roof, with little explanation. The problem is unchecked speculation.

Another problem in this arrangement is an absence of oversight. It is not a lack. It just doesn’t exist. This allows a market that is not just free, but anarchic. There is no method of assessing the price at a realistic level, reminiscent of the dot com bubble that occurred during the 90′s and eventually eroded massive dollars that were invested in the pension plans of many Americans. The result is an over-valuation of the product, with no government entity to check the deception. The other result is massive profit, the very ones that the oil giants are reporting quarterly.

Hillary Clinton, during a presidential stump speech, stated last week that she thought there may be some manipulation of the oil market occurring and suggested that Congress should investigate. Ya think? She didn’t bother to explain that it had already been suggested in 2006. It was a side comment in association with her petty idea of a gas-tax holiday. However, some of us caught the omission. It is appalling how little of this we have seen in the mainstream media. It has been reported rather extensively online.

She should have a good understanding of how things got this way. Does anyone remember Enron? The oil companies are classified as energy companies. Energy companies, such as Enron was, have the authority to operate as futures trading companies outside the scope of the CFTC. The authorization was issued in the form of  the last piece of legislation that was passed  by Congress during  the first Bush Administration, with considerable influence from Wendy Gramm.

Gramm was a member of Bush’s cabinet and wife of former Texas Senator Phil Gramm. The Gramms have, for some reason or other, quietly faded from political life in the past fifteen years. Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has enlisted their endorsement for the upcoming election. He must have forgotten their role in the Enron collapse. Oops!

The week after Bush’s departure from office Mrs. Gramm received an appointment from none other than Ken Lay, CEO of Enron and a very close friend of the Bush Family. She was given  a position on the Enron Board of Directors.

The job paid her nearly a million dollars per year.  The remainder of her pay was in stocks and options. She stayed in the position until shortly before the collapse of Enron, which occurred due to unethical and illegal accounting methods. Her exit occurred at the same time that the Enron officials were cashing in their options and stock, also.

The seat was clearly a personal payoff for a political favor. The same legislation  that applied to Enron applies to current oil companies. Even with the Enron collapse, it has never been repealed.  This would mean that during Mrs. Clinton’s husband’s term in office this order was still in effect. As a matter of fact, it was during the Clinton Administration that Enron was weaving the web that would eventually steal trillions of dollars from the pensions of their workers.  All of this came from an exiting Congress with one stroke of the pen of  an exiting George H.W. Bush and the influence of a job-hopping Wendy Gramm, along with the unconcern of new President Bill Clinton.

The legislation  should have been reversed immediately in 1993. Clinton was apparently too consumed with NAFTA and the national health care legislation that he couldn’t get passed, along with changing welfare as we know it and making sure that any parents who could not pay child support were incarcerated.  However, G.H.W. Bush nor the Gramms were ever investigated.  Now, we have a similar problem that involves a much more integral component to our economy, all of which could have been averted.

For those who do not remember,  Enron collapsed in the summer of 2001, the World Trade Towers were attacked in September of the same year and we were in Iraq in about sixteen months, with much political discussion as a run up to the war.  The result was a wonderful diversionary tactic to keep the media coverage of the Enron collapse to a small roar, along with the extensive personal history of the management officials and the Bush Family.

The authority to operate as they were was directly handed down by Daddy Bush himself.   Geotge W. Bush and Dick Cheney have made a point to disassociate themselves with the Enron officials. Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay, former CEO has since died (how convenient) and former CFO Andy Fastow and Vice-President Jeff Skilling have both been prosecuted.

President Bush has recently addressed the oil problems we currently face. “It took a long time to get here.” he stated.  He added that it will take a long time to solve the situation. I am of the notion that it is going to take a combination of actions to improve the market. Several of them are long term, such as building new refineries.

Personally, I don’t think the oil companies want to see any movement. The game is rigged just the way that they want it. The problem is that oil is too fundamental to the U.S. economy to let any small group of private sector companies hold the rest of the nation hostage over the sale of their product.  Free markets are great, but they should not be manipulated through an absence of oversight or be allowed to operate in the dark or as they please.

There are some short term changes that could affect the market. Any company operating as a futures trading company should be under federal regulation and guarded closely. Prosecutions for violators should be swift and aggressive. Never mind the Martha Stewarts. Manipulation of the market is not acceptable.

Another change would be to restructure the Strategic Oil Reserve System. Requiring the strategic reserve holders to sell a portion of their oil on the open market would be a start. We should severely reduce the holding residual that is paid, or buy the oil from them and put it under ownership of the government. The notion of drilling in ANWR may not be a bad idea, but allowing any private oil company to own the rights is. It should stay in the holdings of the United States. This may take while, due to special interests, but it may be a necessity.

It seems to me that reclassifying oil as a public utility is a real answer. It has worked well with other industries  and has a significant amount of control involved, including the elimination of the factor of greed. All of you capitalist purists can save your argument for something else. The abuse and manipulation of the oil market has eliminated the argument that this should be left to a process free of oversight. There are too many crooks in the business and your credibility is gone. Save the communist remarks also. This is about distributive justice. Oil is too critical to the U.S. economy to allow a potential class warfare system to develop from it, and that may be what is happening.

Of course, the most important thing is for our representatives to get out of management mode and back into representative mode and remember that they work for the electorate at large and not just their financial supporters. Our bribery system has to go, or the participants have to go. They work for us, not the other way around. We have a mountain of issues in this country and energy is at the heart of all of them. It should make for a very interesting election in November. We need change…fundamentally.

Fixing the Gas Price Dilemma…Make It a Public Utility

by Joe Dukes

The recent debate over the suspension of the national gasoline tax has reinvigorated the rage felt by Americans over the price of gasoline. As a nation, we have generally been spoiled to relatively cheap fuel prices. The industry has continually held that the pricing mechanism is a complicated process. It is not only driven by supply and demand, the primary factors in free market systems. The idea of speculation is also involved. The question is speculation of what? Is greed a motivation? Based on the profit margins of oil companies, it surely appears so. Either that, or they are grossly over speculating.

The demand calculation is apparent across the country. We use an enormous amount of fuel. From any employment standpoint, we are a commuting society. Many of the manufacturers are located in industrial parks and hire a regional workforce. This is especially true in states that are highly rural and have only a handful of populous areas. Many of the industries located in the smaller towns do not pay like the ones in the metro areas. This doesn’t even include suburbia. The result is a large commuting workforce. They are clearly feeling the crunch. The difference is that their pay differential to work at home versus commuting is being eaten up by the oil companies. It is highway robbery, literally taking place on the highway.

The truck transportation industry is also taking a severe hit in profitability. In the 1980s the U.S. government quit subsidizing the rail industry. It is immensely cheaper and more fuel efficient to ship products by means of rail, but the government thought that it would be good for the economy to get away from subsidizing and utilize over-the-road trucking. The result has been that for each trailer you need an engine. With the rail system, the need is about one per fifteen. Of course, this was the Reagan Administration. They apparently could not see the dollars, possibly because of the nickels that were stuck in their eyes. The notion of gas shortages preceded them by several years.

Reverting to a rail system may not be something that is feasible. After deregulation, most of the mid-size railroads like the ICGRR sold their short line systems or shut them down altogether. Often times, the companies even pulled the rails out of the ground and salvaged them. The short lines are the rail systems that carry industrial products to the smaller localities. Now that most of the rail systems are huge, and only a few have survived, they primarily service only industrial centers. This further enhances the need for the individual workers to commute, along with the overloading of the highway system with semi-tractor trailers.

In large part, the unwillingness of the Reagan Administration to supplement the delivery system for the nation’s economy is why we are in this mess. The idea of a smaller and more efficient government is noble. However, the reduction MUST include efficiency, both short and long term, and not merely a reduction. This was done in conjunction with the termination of the air traffic controllers who refused to continue working in violation of hours regulation safety laws.

Now, the genie is out of the bottle with no way to replace him. It is a clear cut case of gross mismanagement of OUR tax dollars. However, they had no problem diverting what used to be Social Security Trust Fund receipts into pork barrel projects and corporate welfare. Current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) has referred to it as “embezzlement.” Other academic scholars have referred it as “looting.” Either way, it appears to be criminal.

Fast-forwarding to 2008, we now have another Republican administration (who loves to align themselves with Reagan) that is manipulating the pricing index from the supply side. The issue of supply is a murky area. The notion is that oil is a finite limited resource. The problem is that MONEY is also a finite limited resource. Even if the U.S. government had the power to print more tender nationally, they have no power internationally. All new money in the US economy comes in as debt via the Federal Reserve Bank, which is privately owned and given the sole authority to introduce all new money.

And money values are determined internationally, with the dollar as the barometer. This makes the system ripe for the unconcern of money’s limited status to become a vehicle to extract money from any coffer available. One coffer is taxpayer’s receipts. Another is their wallets, by virtue of absolute need to survive. The empowerment to control the supply creates the condition of financial extraction. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The middle class gets compressed into the lower class. It is prototypical class warfare. Here is how they make the waters murky.

For starters, we have a Federal Strategic Oil Reserve. The ideology behind this is acceptable, but the system can be abused. Many American oil companies, along with some individuals, are drill-and-cap operations. They find reserves. They secure the rights to the reserve. They drill until they hit oil. And then they ESTIMATE how much oil is in the pool. Estimation…how convenient?

The next process is to report it to the Department of Energy and cap it, being paid by the U.S. taxpayer to NOT sell the oil. The amount of the residual is based on the price at the time. When the price goes up, the residual goes up. When the price goes down, THE RESIDUAL STAYS UP. So, over-speculation and over-estimation create obscene profits. For every barrel of oil in the production pipeline there are roughly thirteen purchasers of futures. And, as the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy would have it, there is no oversight in this process. As Mr. Rogers would say, “Can you say corruption, boys and girls?”

At this juncture I would like to point out that the Bush Family has invested in the drill-and-cap oil business for several decades. In particular, they were part owners in Harkin Oil. President Bush does have to disclose his taxes and income while he is in office. His father does not. While his father was in office, the former President Bush did have to disclose his tax records. “W” did not. If you will notice, while George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, George H.W. Bush was not in public office. The same is true in reverse.  “Can you say convenient, boys and girls?” This is not including their general investments in the major oil companies.

In addition to not including the Strategic Oil Reserve in the supply, calculating it out of the pricing index, the Iraqi War creates another condition that affects conciseness. It obviously takes an enormous amount of fuel to run a war. In this situation, the American consumer and economy is in competition for fuel with the U.S. government. This is not to mention the fact that we are also in competition with the Chinese economy for fuel supply. We know how much we are TOLD they buy, but we do not know how much they use or may be stockpiling.

Actually, we know very little about China. However, we do know the size of their military. They have over 200 million potential draft-age infantry soldiers alone, though they boast of an all-volunteer military.  We have less than 2 million in our entire system and, with only 300 million as a total population, our number of draftable individuals is limited.  The bottom line is that China is largely an unknown variable. They appear to have chosen to battle us economically.

Russia’s emergence in the oil industry is also something that gets very little discussion in the United States. Reports are that former President Putin has used the supply to enhance his personal wealth immensely, almost to the point of scandal inside the country. According to the same reports, the Russian mafia has an overt amount of influence with regards to the Russian oil reserves.

What we know for sure is the LARGEST supply of oil in the world is not in the Middle East. It is in Russia. And just before we invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had agreed in principle with Putin to co-op with Russia to help them with the extraction process. It was an agreement that the U.S. wanted, but Saddam beat us to it. He didn’t need any approval to make the deal.

So, what did we do. We took him out of power. Instead of securing access to the Russian reserve, we secured access to the Iraqi reserve, done initially by slant drilling into Iraqi reserves from Kuwait. In Desert Storm I, we just put Saddam in check for invading Kuwait over the slant drilling process.

The oil reserves in Iraq, just like Libya,  are what is known as “sweet” crude. It takes less expense to process into gasoline than any other type in the world, along with being easier to extract. It is also closest to the surface. This translates to profit. Recently reports (3-08) have surfaced that the United States was involved in “slant drilling” from Kuwait prior to the Desert Storm conflict.

The oil reserves in Iraq are mostly in the southern region and connected to Kuwait. If you will notice, we only drove Hussein back to Baghdad. The entire conflict in the Middle East has been about oil. It began in 1953 when we installed the Shah as the dictator of Iran. Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain, who clearly supports the use of our military in Iraq, has as much as admitted this recently. It is not about democracy. It is not about nation building. It is about oil and, more importantly, money.

The instability in the area, along with the interrupted oil supply from Iraq, has created ample rhetorical talking points for the U.S. government to spoon feed managed information to the U.S. taxpayer with zero oversight. It is as though we live in an informational vacuum, even with modern communication technology. We appear complacent enough to think that we can’t do anything about it. I say yes, we can.

Oil is a fundamental necessity to life in America. It drives our economy. Every product in the country is tied to it, because of production and transportation expense. And all great powers live and die by their economies. And we will fall sooner than people think if we do not get a grip on this problem.

The first thing that we need to do is get involved. Instead of thinking that we are subjects of our government, we need to take the reins. According to the Constitution, the last time that I checked, we do not work for our Congressmen. They work for us. We need to mobilize collectively. I submit that nothing mobilizes Americans as much as making them immobile, and that is exactly what is happening with the price of gasoline. Let your representative know that if your job is on the line, then so is his. And it rests on this one issue.

It is increasingly clear that it is time for our representatives, if they care anything about their political careers, to pass legislation making gasoline a public utility. They should also require that more refineries be built on a timely scale, which would fund public works projects. Never mind the NIMBY principle. Override it by eminent domain. This would put investment into the U.S. economy, instead of trying to annex Iraq and create a forced military presence in the Middle East, while lining the pockets of cronies of the government powers. It would also, more importantly, put the pricing index for gasoline under the oversight of a bipartisan commission that would regulate the price and every aspect of the pricing index would be transparent and public knowledge, at least in the United States.

This situation has been apparent for quite some time. I am also sure that it has been discussed behind closed doors in Congress. Up until this point, it has been a political “untouchable.” My experience has been, when you have something that could repair a problem of this magnitude, there is enormous argument and threatening happening in the back hallway. The powerful love power, and they will often kill to keep it.

But, in this country the power ultimately rests in the people. It often takes a severe situation to mobilize the electorate, and that may be what we are seeing with this election. It is clear that John McCain wants no part of this discussion. He is clearly delusional with the national status quo.

Hillary Clinton, likewise, is terrified of this suggestion. Her suggestion to declare a gas tax holiday was great for a belly laugh. Hopefully, Obama is waiting for the primary to end to produce a comprehensive energy policy that will include making gasoline a public utility. I guarantee that it would start a Republican uproar, especially when it is coupled with changing the entire scope and “mindset” that has led to our current foreign policy. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is already preparing to pave the way.

The success of a nation is not about the government officials. It is about the people. The people are about the fundamental economy. In America there is nothing more fundamental than energy. We do need to develop alternatives, thought through completely. Dependency is a great problem. But, I cannot think of one single change in policy that would stabilize our economy better. The art of management is making changes that stabilize variables. And the time is right for this one.

All great nations fall when their economies fail. And they fail when their currencies lose value because of instability, often based on greed. Corporations are not the backbone of our economy. They are the financial beneficiaries. The people are the backbone. Energy is our lifeblood. And our survival is tied to it. Secrecy and manipulation are diseases. Oversight, transparency, and accountability are the cures. Declaring gas as a public utility creates more utility for the public. And, we are all utility maximizers. It is that simple.