Mountain Views News          Saturday, April 30, 2011

12

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, April 30, 2011 

ATTACK OF THE OIL MEN

HOWARD Hays As I See It


GREG Welborn

So what do you do if you’re the most naïve guy in 
the room, in a job that’s way over your head, all 
your major policies to date have proven unpopular 
AND unsuccessful, and yet you still want to 
be President of the United States for another 4 
years? Simple, you blame someone else. Ignore 
the facts, hide the truth and pick on the most 
unpopular guys in the room to deflect attention 
away from you. In short, if you’re Barack Obama, 
you dredge up the old myth that the oilmen are 
trying to ruin this country.

 Last week, President Obama announced in 
his regular radio address that the attorney general 
had “launched a task force with just one job: 
rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the 
oil markets.” This of course was the logical second 
step after his previous announcement that 
his administration was “taking various measures 
to deal with oil prices and was watching out for 
price-gouging”. It is so ironic that a president 
who is jokingly compared to the utterly incompetent 
Jimmy Carter would so slavishly follow 
the same script that Jimmy did when oil prices 
skyrocketed during his term. His energy policy 
and political strategy both ended up being failures. 
Prices didn’t come down, and Jimmy lost 
in a landslide to someone who understood how 
the real world works.

 There is absolutely nothing nefarious, illegal, 
clandestine or even particularly strange about 
what’s happening to the price of oil. Why am 
I so sure of that? Because over the last several 
decades there have been no fewer than 30 investigations 
into the oil industry and their pricing 
practices. Not one – not a single one – has found 
evidence of any illicit, illegal, or even marginally 
questionable practices on the part of oilmen, investors, 
traders or speculators. There has been 
no collusion, no gouging and no manipulations. 
All that has ever been proven is that the free market 
works pretty well to price oil and gasoline 
based on basic supply and demand – just like it 
does with every other product or service sold in 
the economy.

 The price of oil is going up because the demand 
for it is going up and the potential future supply 
is going down. Demand going up is a good 
thing; it means that developing economies, like 
India and China, are finally beginning to grow 
and provide an opportunity for their people to 
attain middle class status. Future supply going 
down is a bad thing, and it’s a direct result of this 
administration’s failed energy/environmental 
policies. Hence, the President’s need to shift the 
topic of conversation.

 Let’s explore this with a simple illustration to 
which we can all relate. If right before the next 
home game of your favorite baseball team (I’m 
partial to the Angels and the 
Padres for the record), the 
city announced that 1/2 of the 
seats in the top section of the 
stadium could not be sold due 
to concerns about the amount 
of green house gases that rise 
from the field and the lower 
seats, what do you think 
would happen to the price of 
tickets to that game? This isn’t rocket science! If 
supply is suddenly decreased, and the same number 
of people still want to buy seats, the price will 
increase. In fact, it will rise to the level where the 
number of people who want to buy seats equals 
the number of seats that are available. That’s how 
markets work. Nothing magic, nothing sinister. 
The only problem is the city’s action in taking 
away one half the seats.

 Returning to the oil markets. This administration’s 
policies have been driving drilling rigs out 
of the Gulf. Six deepwater rigs have already been 
taken out of the gulf, and many of them are heading 
down to Brazil where Brazilian oil companies 
are allowed to drill for oil. President Obama announced 
a six month moratorium on deepwater 
drilling. When he finally removed the moratorium, 
he slowed the pace at which new permits are 
issued to essentially maintain a quasi-ban without 
having to admit as much. One U.S. District 
judge has already challenged the administration 
on this. Last December, the President stopped 
a five year plan which would have opened up 
portions of the mid-Atlantic to offshore drilling. 
The affect was to lock up 7 billion barrels of oil 
and about 36 trillion cubit feet of natural gas. 

 The overall result has been lower domestic oil 
production. The Energy Information Administration 
forecasts that oil supplies from the Gulf 
will fall 13% this year and another 10% next year. 
Supplies go down, so prices go up.

 No magic here – just simple economics and 
inordinately stupid policies. But we shouldn’t be 
surprised. Candidate Obama told us that under 
his environmental policies energy rates would 
have to skyrocket to force us to conserve. If 
there is market manipulation here (and there is), 
it’s being conducted by the guys in suits at 1600 
Pennsylvania Ave. Just more of the transformational 
change we were promised.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a freelance 
writer and has spoken to several civic and 
religious organizations on cultural and moral issues. 
He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife 
and 3 children and is active in the community. He 
can be reached at gregwelborn@earthlink.net.


It’s hard to take tea-partiers 
seriously. They’re not helped 
by a YouTube video of attendees 
at an April 18 rally in 
South Carolina. With Patsy 
Cline’s “Crazy” in the background, 
they denounce our 
non-citizen president (“once 
you’re a Muslim, I don’t think 
you can change”), declare Medicare and Social 
Security “unconstitutional”, and condemn 
our invasion of “Lyboner” (Lebanon? 
Libya? Lipitor?). Preferred news source is 
Fox, early presidential favorite is Donald 
Trump. And for a punch-line, “we’re spending 
too much money on education.” 168,367 
views so far - and counting.

 

Perhaps some on the right themselves didn’t 
take these new activists seriously enough. 
Lobbyist-funded front groups mobilized 
crowds to disrupt town hall meetings more 
than a year ago, incensed by warnings of 
cuts to Medicare through “Obamacare”. 
They turned out en masse to the polls last 
November to support Republican challengers 
promising to tackle unemployment and 
growing deficits.

 

Many, though, weren’t interested in merely 
serving as surrogate warriors for the GOP. 
Many actually cared about jobs, red ink and 
the future of Medicare. They learned town 
hall meetings are effective venues in which 
to voice those concerns.

 

Beneficiaries of reduced upper-marginal tax 
rates, those pulling in twenty grand ($20G) 
a month turned out to be less likely to attend 
town hall meetings than those who rely 
on Medicare. And, there was a mistaken 
assumption that those currently enrolled 
are only concerned about themselves. As a 
64-year-old town hall participant told her 
congressman, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA), 
“You seem to think that because I’m not affected, 
I won’t care if my niece, my grandson, 
my child is affected. I do care.” She 
continued, “You said nothing in the campaign 
about ‘I’m going to change Medicare.’ 
Now you voted for a plan that will destroy 
Medicare.”

 

Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill) got a similar reception 
when trying to explain the budget 
authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to his 
constituents in Buffalo Grove. As reported 
in the local Daily Herald, “It began with audience 
members telling Dold they don’t believe 
chopping 10 percentage points off the 
highest corporate tax rate will create jobs. 
A handful of people in the audience identified 
themselves as business owners and accountants 
who said their effective corporate 
income tax rate is already lower than the 
lowest rates proposed in the Ryan plan. They 
pointed to companies such as GE that pay 
almost no taxes despite billions in profits as 
evidence.”

 

Turning Medicare into a taxpayer subsidy 
for private insurance was sold by Rep. Dold 
as “giving choice to individuals”. In response, 
according to the Herald, “Audience members 
said buying private insurance is a shell 
game where no one really knows what costs 
a company will cover or to what degree.”

Rep. Ryan got a taste of it himself at a town 
hall in Milton, WI. A constituent began by 
describing himself as a “life-long conservative”, 
and noted that “History has shown that 
concentrating more wealth at the top has 
been the worst thing for our economy.” 

 

He continued, “The middle class is disappearing 
right now. During this time of prosperity, 
the top 1 percent was taking about 
10 percent of the total annual income, but 
yet today we are fighting to not let the tax 
breaks for the wealthy expire? And we’re 
fighting to not raise the Social Security cap 
from $87,000? I think we’re wrong.”

 

Rep. Ryan responded, “I don’t disagree with 
the premise of what you’re saying. The question 
is what’s the best way to do this. Is it to 
redistribute . . . “

 

The constituent pressed his point, “You have 
to lower spending. But it’s a matter of there’s 
nothing wrong with taxing the top because it 
does not trickle down.”

 

Rep. Ryan’s response, “We do tax the top”, 
brought a chorus of derisive boos from the 
audience.

 

Rep. Sean Duffy, another Wisconsin Republican, 
didn’t fare any better when a 
constituent pointed out the budget figures 
Duffy tried to pass off as having come from 
the Congressional Budget Office were in 
fact corporate-sponsored, discredited talking 
points straight out of The Heritage 
Foundation.

 

(Last April 1, Wisconsin Democrats held a 
“Food and Clothing Drive” for Rep. Duffy, 
after he’d complained to a constituent, an 
unemployed construction worker whose 
wife faced a cut in her teacher’s salary, that 
he himself had to “struggle to meet my bills” 
on his congressman’s salary of $174,000 a 
year.)

 

The April 18 South Carolina rally featured 
Tea Party favorites Gov. Nikki Haley and 
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Another 
speaker, Republican State Sen. Tom Davis, 
isn’t as well known, lacking the Freedom 
Works, Americans for Prosperity and Koch 
Brothers corporate backing enjoyed by 
others.

 

In an interview after speaking, Sen. Davis 
explained, “We’re not a big state. Our general 
fund is $5.1 billion dollars. And with a 
$5.1 billion dollar general fund budget, we’re 
giving away one billion dollars in tax credits 
to targeted industries that have lobbyists 
that are going to lobby for them? Somebody 
pays that bill, and there’s no free lunch. Who 
pays the bill are those folks out there that 
don’t have the power to hire lobbyists.”

 

Sen. Davis continued, “It’s absolutely crazy. 
And it’s not the free market and it’s not what 
made our country great. Our country has 
been because we’ve counted on individuals 
taking risks, saving money, working hard. 
Now, it’s large corporations that have access 
to lawmakers that get huge tax breaks 
and there’s no way that the little guy can 
compete.”

 

It was the British granting “huge tax breaks” 
to the East India Company, making it almost 
impossible for the “little guy” tea merchants 
in the Colonies to compete, that brought 
about the original “tea party” rally in Boston 
Harbor.

 

Then, they had pamphlets. Now, we have 
YouTube. Footage of Rep. Ryan’s constituent 
giving him that needed history lesson on 
wealth inequality can be found there. 

Due to the high demand for her tutoring and education services, bookstore 
owner, Sally Morrison, is opening a new learning center here in Sierra Madre. 
Mindspring Education Center will cater to students (children and adults) 
interested in furthering their reading, writing, math, spelling, and 
comprehension skills. In addition, Sally offers assistance in study skills, 
homework, and test preparation. She also specializes in helping students 
with dyslexia and other learning difficulties. Those interested in summer 
sessions should contact Mindspring soon because space is limited.
As a result of this business expansion, Sally Morrison and Jeffrey Ingwalson, 
owners of Sierra Madre Books, will be closing the bookstore in June 2011. 
“We appreciate all the support we’ve received from our customers over the 
past few years, but are excited about our new venture. We look forward to 
continuing to be part of this community.”
For questions about Mindspring Education Center, please call (626) 355-1972.
For questions about Sierra Madre Books, please call (626) 836-3200.
Announcing:
The Opening of...
Mindspring Education CenterOne-to-One Instruction for All Ages37 Auburn Ave., Suite 7ASierra Madre, CA 91024(626) 355-1972www.mindspringEDC.com