The economic calamity now facing our nation can be tied directly to the convening of Dick Cheney's energy task force in the early days of the Bush presidency at a time when oil was going for a mere $35.00 a barrel. Those behind closed door meetings with oil boys from here and Europe resulted in an energy policy focused solely on fossil fuels and tens of billions in subsidies to the oil industry. The crude (no pun intended) reality is that the product Cheney, Bush, and friends have sold and earned forturnes from near their entire adult lives is"oil" and the policies they formulated and deceptively shoved down the American public's unknowing throat is a story of greed and treachery at the highest levels. It would be hard to find a more collossal blunder in the direction of national policy than the decisions forged by Cheney and friends during the course of those secret so-called energy (ie oil) hearings. While Americans remain dependent on OPEC, and Exxon et al are earning record profits as a result of a national policy which has paid mere lip service to alternative fuel forms, what the American people have reaped is a war which will indebt us to the next millenium, the killing and maiming of thousands of our children, and an economy on life support.
Since the dawn of the industrial age, fossil fuel has been the world's major energy source. Oil has driven the industrial engine and at the same time spawned a self-perpetuating, near omnipotent political machine. What this machine doesn't want us to know is that with the massive R&D the problem merits, other energy forms, corn, sugar, who knows what else, can get the same job done. It isn't just bones from which energy can be extracted. But guess what, the oil industry was there first, amassing huge power, and fights with all its resources resisting change as Cheney, Exxon, OPEC and friends work to eliminate or forestall for as long as possible competition from other energy sources while bleeding the economy dry. It's the "undue influence" of the "military industrial comples" Ike warned of in its most un-American, undemocratic and destructive manifestation.
Since the dawn of the industrial age, fossil fuel has been the world's major energy source. Oil has driven the industrial engine and at the same time spawned a self-perpetuating, near omnipotent political machine. What this machine doesn't want us to know is that with the massive R&D the problem merits, other energy forms, corn, sugar, who knows what else, can get the same job done. It isn't just bones from which energy can be extracted. But guess what, the oil industry was there first, amassing huge power, and fights with all its resources resisting change as Cheney, Exxon, OPEC and friends work to eliminate or forestall for as long as possible competition from other energy sources while bleeding the economy dry. It's the "undue influence" of the "military industrial comples" Ike warned of in its most un-American, undemocratic and destructive manifestation.
