Here We Go Again

As gas prices rise across America, journalists are making the rounds to service stations. "We just filled up our SUV and it cost $89." Shocked and awed, they ponder about the effects of another season of lost sales earnings caused by frugal Americans: our adolescent recovery, may not make it out of puberty, they threaten.

Yes, it does hurt when you drop a $50 into the tank and it still isn't full. However, the picture is still wrong. Many being interviewed at the gas stations are still driving the wrong cars. Last summer, when gas was sky high, I recall seeing Hummer's and other such monstrous and failed business ideas of the now extinct car companies, sitting in driveways collecting bird droppings.

Then, around New Years, when gas prices were bottoming out again, those lunch-box like cars with their racing strips and tinted windows could be seen idling at lights with tiny mothers chatting gleefully away on cellphones while the kiddies in the back watched movies and ate chips. America's heroin was again cheap.

Lost earnings as a result of less travel this summer caused by high gas prices may slow our recovery but in the long term, it will speed up our national transition from a nation held hostage to 50 years of good, old-fashioned bad American business practices. The whims of the board room and the scavenger hunts for profit at any cost are now considered by many as the causes for our decline. The era of make bigger and worse and less competitive cars has come to an end.

As the end of that era settles, bankruptcy for GM drying in the books, "il Chryler" soon to become part of Fiat, the Obama people have made it a national priority to force big business to actually produce things that can compete in a world economy; and, the main priority of whether to produce or not will no longer be, "by how much will it increase our bonuses at the end of the year?"

Greed

It was the greed of big business which led us to where we are; and, it was the idiocy of government, usually republican led congresses and administrations, that permitted big business to turn our manufacturing core into something that is barely more efficient than Russia's.

Conservative disingenuousness sold the mantra to the masses that government intervention in the market was bad: it was "communist, socialist...liberal even." Yes, democratic presidents have also chosen to believe that the market is self-correcting and usually right. This philosophy may have held some water back when there were some regulations still in place.

But, from the "government is the problem" speech of Reagan to W's dismantling of our government so that there simply were no resources left to properly regulate anything, the profits being made by big business and Wall Street were simply so amazing that really it is hard to blame them for stealing our nation's wealth, our future. Owning islands and box seats for every team would be kind of cool, right?

President Obama, being accussed by those same wealthy patrons of the last 30 years of republican-led theft, is forcing big business to recall that the nation in which they are located, and whose interests they should also consider when they have their board meetings, is America. Islands belong to countries and not corporate "barons." The new Yankee Stadium is farcical in its catering to the corporate world. Whoever heard of paying $2000 for one seat at one game?

These companies, Wall Street, are not "island-companies" inhabiting a world of other "island companies" abusing the world's resources, human and natural, all for the sake of wealth, more wealth and still more wealth. They are corporate entities obligated to give to the national foundation which permits them to exist.

Business, in America, is now being forced to be people, nation-friendly. Perhaps, I am naive to believe such a thing, but, I know one thing for sure, virtually everything President Obama has done since becoming president is a step toward this end goal.

Unless, however, the republicans/conservatives regain some power and then, they will continue to dismantle our national wealth and then it will be too late--the global warming which doesn't exist, they say, will have done its deed and by then Denver will be under water.

Yes, rising gas prices make today difficult, but they remind us of our dependence on foreign oil and on really, really bad business decisions of the past half-century. Business cannot again be allowed to run free without rules and without the interest of the nation at the heart of its mission statement.

Good luck, President Obama!