The Answer

In the last blog, the big question was: why are gasoline prices so high and rising, with a glut of domestic oil and declining demand?

Newt Gingrich has a simple plan for what to do about it: price controls. Taking a page out of FDR’s playbook, Newt is now promising to hold gasoline prices at $2.50 a gallon if he gets elected. It’s the same approach used in North Korean economics. Stalin used a similar strategy.

Is Newt ashamed of this economic pedigree? Seems not.

The McClatchy newspapers analysts examined the gasoline price increase from several angles and concluded that it’s a big riddle.

 In a closed-door meeting earlier this month, Speaker John A. Boehner instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger they find among their constituents when they return to their districts for the Presidents’ Day recess. Boehner is quoted here.

The problem has become so worrisome for Obama that he has gone into full bore defense mode, realizing his opponents have a winning strategy: blaming his failure to support the drill-baby-drill approach (regardless of whether oil supplies have anything to do with the prices of gasoline or not). 

According to the Washington Post, a panicked Obama said that the United States is producing more oil now than at any time during the last eight years, with a record number of rigs pumping and the White House was prepared to open new areas in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to exploration.[1]

National Public Radio has been hosting all kinds of experts who claim that the price rise is due to a shortage of refineries or to increased demand in the international market for refined gasoline, and gaslone can now be refined in the US cheaper than elsewhere because of our glut of cheap natural gas. (Natural gas is used “crack” crude oil into gasoline.)[2]

These are not the answers.

The answer to the question is price manipulation.

Some non-mainstream news sources have explained how this is happening. The Truth2Power website described clearly how the “contango” strategy works by storing huge quantities of oil in anticipation of future price increases.  Read their explanation for a real eye opener: here.

And just who is doing this price manipulation?

This guy:

This is an unretouched photo one of the famous Koch brothers, owners of America’s second largest company.

By controlling the price of refined gasoline using the contango strategy and other means, the Koch brothers can kill three birds with one stone: 

• make billions for themselves
• make the public think its all Obama’s fault, and 
• continue to dump gazillions into the Romney campaign.

The description of what the Koch boys do with all the money made from your gasoline dollars is really mindboggling.

The Koch brothers are true masters of the universe. These lying, cheating, and stealing billionaires have been manipulating commodity prices for decades, completely free of transparency or oversight by anyone, thanks to the exemptions from regulation they got from Phil and Wendy Gramm. 

Koch Industries have become the second richest company in American by pulling this scam. Every time you pull up to the gas pump, you pay a big fat tax to the Kochs.

Anyone interested in the details of how the Koch’s pull this off should take a look at the excellent Think Progress website or, better yet, the Koch Industries own slide show explaining in detail how they do it. 

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1. Mark Landler,” In a Nod to Gas”,Washington Post,  Feb 23, 2012

2. All Things Considered, "Energy Fuels Newt Gingrich’s Comeback Plan", Feb 26, 2012.

Radar

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone.  I can see all obstacles in my way.”--Jimmy Cliff[i]

Your blogster is back from the Spanish Main. You lucky readers you!  Your brief but bitter period of confusion about what to think can now end.  Read on.
What is this?

This is a picture of the radar device aboard the sailboat I have been sailing on for the past  two weeks in Columbia, Panama, Aruba, etc. while this blog has been silent.   Radar is a handy thing to have, one might think, especially in the dark or fog at sea when big dangerous ships are in the vicinity. You don't want to accidentally bump into this guy!

Newt Gingrich promised this week to bring gas down to $2.50 a gallon and House Republican lawmakers are putting forward their standard package of solutions: drill baby drill everywhere and anywhere, the Article Wildlife Refuge, offshore Florida and every other State, tap American oil shale, expedite the tar sands pipeline, extract every last drop of oil we can from anywhere within our borders as soon as we possibly can. To Hell with future generations.

Never mind that everyone knows that none of these ideas would have any effect on gas prices anywhere in the remotely foreseeable future, even if the Canadian tar sands oil were used in the US instead of being shipped to China as currently planned. Those facts are filtered out of the R radar because the R radar declutters data and imparts meaning in the same familiar way. Their heuristics (rules; thinking short-cuts) are programmed into the party line.  

It is the same deal for Democrats. They turn on the D declutter and frame things according to their own different heuristics (declutter rules).   In this case, however, the declutter on their radar is guiding them into a some stinking doo doo.  Their radar is missing an obvious fact, a gigantic pile of elephant poop that somehow got decluttered out of their radar.

Unfortunately, radar is not perfect. Unless you carefully adjust a feature called “declutter”, the picture you get is a confusing screen with too much data, all white and black splotches, signifying nothing and impossible to interpret.  On the other hand, if you turn on declutter to remove too much distracting data, you end up also erasing a big dangerous item that you need.  Either way you often don't see what you need to see.

Result: shipwreck.

Jimmy Cliff thought he was seeing clearly in the film, The Harder They Come, but he ended up with a bullet in his head.

Your brain is just like radar. As scientists have shown over and over again for 30 years, our brains always have declutter turned on, at least after infancy.  We would otherwise take in too much confusing and distracting data and could not make sense of the world around us. We need that declutter. Cognitive science researchers and psychologists call it our system of heuristics. Heuristics in this context are rules based on prior experience and beliefs used to filter data input and make meaning out of the mess of total perception input.  Vast amounts of raw truthful data comes in, but we chew it up in our meaning making machines.

Our brain declutter meaning making machine has a downside.  We don't see clearly, as Jimmy cliff found out the hard way.

Take any political issue. A hot one right now is gas prices. This one comes and goes but recently gas prices have spiked so it's back on the political hit parade.  Gas prices are up 12% from last year, and Obama is running scared, trying to play defense.[ii]

Fact: Americans are pissed as hell that it now takes $300 to fill up the tank on their Humvees.

In the face of that, Henry Waxman, Edward J. Markey and two has-been liberal Republican environmentalists are advocating another approach. They want to make power plants and oil refineries pay for carbon emissions, essentially increase the cost of gasoline.[iii]  Forgetting that Dick Cheney said that deficits don’t matter, they argue that this will have the extra added benefit of reducing the deficit. And cleaning up the enviroment to boot.

Oh my God, Henry and Ed!  Turn off your declutter and smell the elephant poop!

When democrats and environmentalists step in a pile of doo doo as big as this over and over again, you have to wonder if their olfactory radar is just plain broken.

If everyone turned off their declutter for a minute, they just might see what is REALLY causing gas prices to jump all over the place in the short term.

You can guess the answer. It is rather obvious if you think about it.

But if you don’t get it, the answer will be provided in tomorrow’s blog.

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[i] Lyrics of song, “I can See Clearly Now” from the film, The Harder They Come.

[ii]  Mark Landler,” In a Nod to Gas Prices, Obama Talks About Energy,” Washington Post, Feb 23, 2012.

[iii] Op Ed, Washington Post, Feb 23, 2012.

Safe Landings

Dear President Obama:

I need your help. I am poor, sick, handicapped, and (obviously to blog readers) mentally ill.  Mitt Romney created Romney-Obamacare, but then he said “I don’t care about the poor. They have a safety net.”

Newt Gingrich said, “You are such a total Massachusett liberal idiot Mitt. The poor like that worthless bloghead, Ed E. Line, don’t need a safety net. They have a spider web. They are all caught in a European-style-socialist spider web that is holding them back. they should have gotten a job as a janitor in high school.”

I say, a pox on both your safety devices.  I don’t want no stinking European style socialist web crawling with spiders like Saul Alinsky. I dont want no big net with holes in it.  For myself, I want an American style safety device.

Color my parachute GOLDEN!

That is what I want, a golden parachute, the same kind they use on Wall Street.  I want the kind of free enterprise parachute they give to CEOs of big companies after the CEO has totally and completely driven the company into the ground.  I want the kind Carley Fiornia got when she messed up roayally at Hewlitt-Packard ($45 mill). I want the $44,000,000 kind Angelo Mozilo got after he totally destroyed Countrywide Finance and wrecked the savings of thousands of American homeonwers and brought the entire world to the brink of economic collapse.  I want $130 mill like Michael Ovitz got from Disney.

For a list of the kind of parachutes that would OK with me, click on Time magazine.

Thanks for your time.  I look forward to your next euro-socialist scheme which you probably inherited from Saul Alinsky.

Sincerely,
Ed E. Line
Temporarily self-deported to Aruba, Netherlands Antilles

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).

The Biggest Liar of Them All

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the biggest liar of them all?

Sounds like a tough contest with a lot of competition, but-- no.  The answer is simple.  Look in the mirror.

YOU ARE!

You are the biggest liar to yourself.  Don’t feel bad.  The same thing is true of all other human beings.  Our brains are constantly feeding us big fat juicy lies about reality.  You can prove this to yourself by looking at any optical illusion.  Look at the picture below. 

  

Your mind probably tells you that something is moving.  Look more carefully.  

Optical illusions are the most obvious way to discover how much your mind tricks you.  One of my favorites is the so called “hollow face" .  Watch an example of that one on YouTube.

Our perceptions are essentially a kind of “controlled hallucination”.  The way our minds work is that our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) ….[determine] much of what we see, hear and feel.”[i]  In other words, our beliefs and expectations about what things are or should be will trump the obvious truth staring us in the face.

New scientific studies of perception are confirming old theories.  Socrates believed that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only an image or copy of the real world. The eccentric savant  Gurdjieff had a similar theory, based on sources much earlier in time.  Gurdjieff said that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep….Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.”[ii] He liked to prove his theory by disappearing in public in broad daylight. Even without any disguise, he was able to walk around unnoticed because of his behavior and body language and control of the context.

I recently proved Gurdjieff’s theory by working as a coat check person at a large event.  No disguise, only context.  Only 2 out of dozens of people I knew at the event recognized me.

This attribute of human cognition has a significant impact on how we think and what we believe to be true in politics, religion, sex, science--in fact-- everything.  Cognitive science has proven that If you believe in something strongly and it's really important to you as a person [your worldview] you will cling to that matter what. “Despite best efforts to correct misinformation it can't be completely eliminated ."[iii]

I thought maybe “critical thinking” was the answer, but I looked it up. Critical thinking defined as:

“The disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."

Yikes! Do you know anyone who does that?

Most likely you don’t think that way, especially if you are reading this blog.

But at least the next time some politician tells you something you already believe to be true, WATCH OUT! Most likely, it is a big fat lie, and YOU are playing a part in it.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO REGULAR READERS:  This blog will be temporarily inactive for about a week and a half. I have taken Mitt Romney’s advice and self deported to the  San Blas Islands in Panama, travelling by sailboat (see a version of the boat here).  I will have no internet access either on the boat or on the islands.

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).

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[i] Andy Clark, Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds, 2010, available here online.

[ii] P.D. Ouspensky (1949), In Search of the Miraculous.

[iii] Assistant Professor Ullrich Ecker and colleagues from The University of Western Australia  have outlined their findings in a recent article published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review . (2011)

Can Congress Fix Itself?

Some observers of the tsunami of political corruption we are enduring suggest that Congress should clean up the mess, starting with itself.  There is even a “Fix Congress Now Caucus” in the House of Representatives, hard at work on that job. The caucus consists of two newly minted Republican congressmen.  They have developed an impressive program consisting of two agenda items: term limits and lower retirement pay.[i]  

As I write this blog, democrats and republicans in the House and Senate are struggling to gain partisan political advantage over a pending bill dealing with unethical behavior in the legislature, the STOCK Act.  That bill addresses a few symptoms of the disease (insider trading by representatives for one), but does not get close to the heart of the problem.  Even so, it has become a political football and is uncertain of passage.

The Coffee Party and other groups have more comprehensive legislative solutions on their website, but oddly enough, Jack Abramoff, the nation’s leading hands-on expert on political corruption offers up some of the most serious cures in his recent book.

Abramoff recommends that we should enact laws TOTALLY banning contributions and gifts to politicians and political campaigns by any lobbyist or Federal contractor.  Next, he wants the revolving door to be slammed completely shut—forever— so that if you serve in Congress or work in Congress, you would be under a lifetime ban from lobbying or working for any company, partnership or firm that does any lobbying of Federal contracting.  According to Abramoff, and he should know, any watered down version of his prescriptions would only open loopholes and deepen the corruption.[ii]

The problem with all this self medication is that asking congress to fix itself is like asking a murderous Mexican drug cartel to “Just Say No”.  Earlier blog rants explained how our elections are gamed and how Congress has become totally penned in by lobbyists and campaign bribes.

Congress, at least the current congress, cannot be the doctor. It is part of the infection.  Working with the current Congress is like taking a lethal poison to cure cancer.

 Until we have a new Congress and change the way Congress, elections, and the whole political system works, to remove the pervasive overwhelming corrupt influence of money, we are not going to be able to cure the systemic problems. 

A least one prestigious law professor thinks amending the constitution to take money out of politics is the only way out.[iii]

Fixing this mess will take a huge crisis of awareness.

It could happen.  Not many years ago, Brazil was in even worse shape than the United States is now. Inflation was so extreme that people had to take wheelbarrows full of cash to the bank, and by the time they got there, it was worthless.  Corruption was rampant and the divide between rich and poor was even greater than in the United States. The situation became a frightening crisis.  Suddenly something weird happened. Desperate leaders on both sides abandoned their rigid political mindsets and starting doing things that made sense, regardless of preexisting positions and ideology.  Right wing executives began to realize that if a tiny minority had all the money, there would be no market for the goods and services that business wanted to produce. The left moved right and the right moved left.  Now Brazil is an economic powerhouse, the envy of the developing world. 

Could it happen here?

The only way out of the ocean of corruption is a complete of change attitudes on the part of a majority of the American people, a shift away from acceptance of corrupt behavior .

Impossible?

Maybe.  But we did it with civil rights. We did it with the Vietnam war.  In both cases it took massive marches and expressions of outrage by large numbers of concerned people. I don’t see that in the works quite yet. The Occupy movement is still a baby, but it could happen.

As the old Navajo saying goes, “if we don’t turn around now, we just might get where we are going”.

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments

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[i] Ben Pershing, In Session, Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2012, p.A25..

[ii] Abramoff, Jack; Capitol Punishment (2011), p. 273.

[iii] Lawrence Lessig, Republic Lost (2011).

UNELECTED ENABLERS AND KING MAKERS

Cheerleading the lying, cheating, and stealing by banks and politicians is a group of unelected enablers and king makers.  Their dominance of our political machinery is making a mockery of representative democracy.

One of the biggest unelected enablers is Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, as well as hundreds of other media outlets worldwide.  Murdoch makes no secret of his desire to own enough media outlets tyo control anything and everything in politics.

Next are the billionaire king makers who single-handedly promote their own agendas, candidates in political contests, and even choices for President of the United States.  Perhaps best known are the Koch brothers, who shovel truckloads of cash to the campaigns of Tea-Party-backed conservative candidates nationwide.

In the 2012 Republican primary, there have emerged a number of other billionaire king makers, each of whom has their own candidate.

Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas Casino magnate, has Newt Gingrich.  As of February 2012, Adelson has put $10,000,000 into a super PAC supporting Gingrich. Huntsman had his own billionaire father, and Foster Friess has Rick Santorum.

In all three cases, these billionaire enablers made it possible for the candidates to run or continue in the race, at least for a while. Without their money all three candidates would have been long gone from the primary race.

Rick Santorum’s unelected enabler, Friess, uses a super PAC called the “Red, White, and Blue Fund” to keep his candidate alive, running negative television ads that do not need to be approved by the anyone.  He appears on stage with Rick after each Santorum primary victory.

According to the NY Times, a “battle” is raging among a few billionaires to be the chief enabler, the one who picks The Republican party’s next presidential candidate.[1]  They can all use the super PAC device authorized by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case to make unlimited bets on the candidate of their choice, reducing to insignificance the puny campaign contributions made by ordinary voters.

The biggest unelected enabler of all is Grover Norquist.  It would be suicide to run in a Republican primary for any office in the land unless you sign the pledge to Norquist. 236 of the 242 Republicans in Congress in 2011 took the pledge.[2] The pledge requires you to promise never to vote to increase taxes or close corporate tax loopholes without an offsetting tax reduction.  You must “oppose any net reduction of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”[3]

Norquist has been called “a fiscal terrorist” by Ronald Reagan’s former budget director, David Stockman.[4]  Tax breaks protected by the Norquist pledge now cost the government $1.2 trillion per year (more than defense, Medicare and Medicaid, and social security), and most of the benefit further enriches the already wealthy.[5]

Neera Tanden of the liberal Center for American Progress says: "That's what's amazing about Grover Norquist. It's not that he's created an anti-tax allergic reaction within the Republican Party. It's that he's been able to define anything that takes away tax subsidies for corporations as a tax increase." [6]

When a candidate for office signs the pledge of allegiance to the nation, no one complains.  When a candidate pledges to vote his conscience or to do what is best for his constituents, no questions are asked.  But when a candidate signs a pledge to follow the program of an unelected ideologue to avoid having that person order millions of dollars in contributions to be used against him, something has broken down in the system of representative government.[7]

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Thanks to the alert reader, a former employee of Congress, who sent me this informative and enjoyable board game:

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).

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[1] Jim Rutenberg and Nichols Confessore, “A Wealthy Backer Likes the Odds on Santorum,” NY Times, Feb. 8, 2012.

[2] Tim Dickenson, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 24, 2011.

[3] http://www.atr.org/taxpayer-protection-pledge. Brian Rosenberg, a Star Tribune reporter, argues that the pledge undermines democracy and that Norquist is more powerful than any elected politician: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/125245319.html.

[4] Tim Dickenson, “Grover Norquist: The Billionaire’s Best Friend,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 24, 2011.

[5] Tim Dickenson, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 24, 2011.

[6] All Things Considered, NPR Radio broadcast, Oct. 11, 2011.

[7] According to Right Wing Watch, People for the American Way. Norquist’s organization, Americans for Tax Reform, spent close to $4 million in the midterm election to elect Republicans to Congress, and 235 Congressmen and 41 Senators, all Republicans, have signed Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.”

You Lie!

The title of today’s rant is plagiarized, of course, from an American hero, Congressman Joe Wilson who audaciously gave President Obama a piece of his mind during one of the State of the Union speeches.

It’s all about lies. The ones we love to tell and the lies we love to hear. What are your favorites? Send them in by commenting on this blog so that everyone can enjoy them. (See the note at the bottom to discover how to comment.)

Former President Nixon once (supposedly) said “It’s important to be sincere, even if you don’t really mean it.”  So don’t joke around.

Lies I love to hear from beautiful women:

I love you.

It’s what I’ve always wanted (upon receiving an outboard motor for her birthday.)

You are so smart [can substitute “strong,” “brave,” “handsome,” “cool”, etc. for “smart”)

Lies I love to hear from politicians: (Although our first POTUS said “I cannot tell a lie,” we have gotten over that.  Modern politicians manage to be more flexible on the whole veracity thing.)

I am not a crook. (Nixon)

I never had sexual relations with that woman. (Clinton).

Deficits are not important. (Cheney)

I never inhaled. (Clinton)

Global warming is a hoax. (Presidential candidate Santorum and many others)

We have discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (“W”)

We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. (Rumsfeld,  also on weapons of mass destruction.)

The bitch set me up. (Former DC Mayor Barry when caught in a hotel room cocaine sting)

I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere. (Sarah Palin)

Corporations are people. (Romney)

Whales are people. (PETA leaders)

Money is speech (The Supremes)

Read my lips. No new taxes.(Bush I)

Other lies L love to hear:

Evolution is just a theory.

Guns don’t kill people. People do.

Clean coal is a green fuel.

America is the land of opportunity.

O’Bama is Irish.

Obama is Kenyan.

Wall Street is a great engine of economic growth.

The Mafia is a great engine of economic growth.

Alan Greenspan is one really smart dude.

SEND ME YOUR FAVORITES!

The genius at Google who set this blog up for me did not make it easy for readers to send in comments.  I went along with the trick because it protected me from knuckleheads who might attempt to undermine the veracity and wisdom of the various diatribes I was getting away with in the blog.

But the time has come to blow the whistle on this scam.

The secret to commenting on this blog is to click on the deceptive little hyperlink at the bottom that says “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).  Then you can unload on me with impunity.

The Best Congress Money Can Buy

We have the best Congress money can buy, as the old wag said.

Is the Stock Act now under consideration in Congress going to change that?

In an earlier blog (Lying, Cheating, and Stealing in the Political System-Part One), I ranted about corrupt behavior in Congress.  Provoked by that bog and by an exposé on 60 Minutes , the U.S. Senate took up a little bill last week to stop insider trading by members of Congress.

It started as a simple idea: no more congressional insider trading. But when the bill came up for debate, some Senators decided to expand it to cover a few other kinds of unethical behavior regularly engaged in by the political elite.  The session quickly turned into a feeding frenzy of amendments. There were so many different kinds of crooked behavior on stage that the bill exploded with dozens of amendments. There were amendments to ban earmarks, amendments to close the revolving door, amendments to deal with the business of political intelligence, and all kinds of unrelated amendments.

Pundits watching this spectacle have a cornucopia of ideas for how to fix corruption in Congress.

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman says that full disclosure is the answer.  He recommends that congressmen dress up like NASCAR drivers in uniforms with the logos of all the banks and other firms from which they are taking money.[1]

Former convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now out of prison, suggests that we could save a lot of time and money as a nation if we simply had the lobbyists send their legislative proposals directly to the President for his signature without stopping to pay off Congress.[2]

Washington Post writer Steven Pearlstein argues that we could make the whole process more efficient if we changed the laws to allow the direct purchase of votes (he suggests $1,000 per vote) and legalized cash bribes for congressmen.[3]

Here is your chance to cast an honest vote. Post a comment on this blog voting for the solution you like best.  I promise to tabulate your votes honestly without lying, cheating, or stealing.

 The options are:

1.       The NASCAR disclosure uniform (Friedman).

2.       Lobbyists bypass Congress (Abarmoff).

3.       Legalizing cash bribes and vote purchasing (Pearlstein).

 

Next time: Can Congress Fix Itself?

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[1] Thomas Friedman, NY Times, Oct. 29, 2011.

[2] Abramoff on the Colbert Report, December 8, 2011.

[3] Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2012, p.G1.