June 12, 2008--Give 'em the Gas

I don’t own a car and am fortunate enough, if I did own one, not to have to worry too much about the cost of gasoline.

But while snowbirding in Florida this past winter we of course needed to rent one and that swept us directly into the world of almost daily price-per-gallon price increases and thrust us into many conversations with frustrated and angry people struggling much more than we to pay their mounting bills.

And we were also temporarily residing in the one county in America where plummeting real estate values were perversely leading the nation and almost everyone, expect for the gazillionaires with houses right on the beach, were worried about foreclosures and the imminent loss of most of what they had through their lifetimes managed to accumulate. This reality hugely compounded the appropriately raw feelings.

In other words we were living for a time right on the cutting edge of how corporate, national, governmental, and geopolitical forces are conflating to undermine what is left of the post-Second World American dream of upward mobility, where the rising middle class could see their own way to a better and more secure life and knew that if their children succeeded in school and worked hard they would do even better.

This hopeful, and even realistic vision, they could daily see literally draining away as they strained to pay the 40 to 60 bucks it was costing to fill up their tanks. Not to mention the pass-along inflating cost of everything else that needed to be trucked in that they required to sustain themselves and their families.

Over coffee every morning we would hear people railing about what they saw to be a system rigged against them and designed to pad the bottom lines of rapacious oil companies. All of this aided and abetted by politicians in Washington who were in one way or another on the payrolls of Big Oil.

And although by early winter even folks who had voted twice for George Bush had turned against him and what they then saw to be his mistaken war, few were putting all the pieces together—the effect on the larger and daily economy of the connection between turmoil in the Middle East, corporate greed, governmental posturing and corruption, and, yes, their own consumption habits. All connected; all playing their role.

My coffee companions were just too angry and frustrated to find a calm moment to figure it all out.

There may now though be that opportunity to do so. If the media would only allow the two presidential candidates to duke it out over policy issues and resist supplying us with a steady gotcha-diet of misspeaks (McCain yesterday saying that it doesn’t matter when the troops will be withdrawn) and petty scandal-du-jours (the resignation of one of Obama’s vice presidential vetter), we may get a chance to see how all the forces at work are conspiring to rob us and the rest of the world of a more hopeful future.

In regard to energy dependency, almost lost in this hyped news reporting was the recent announcement by General Motors and Ford that they will soon be closing a number of assembly plants that manufacture most of their gas-guzzling cars, trucks, and S.U.V.s; and, more significantly since this does not bode well for the American economy, Toyota reported that they will introduce commercially competitive plug-in hybrid cars as early as 2010 (less than two years from now) and thereby inevitably increase their domination of the automobile market by producing cars that will be cheaper to run while being more environmentally forgiving. (See linked NY Times article.)

So we’re getting it half right—stopping to make big vehicles that no one any longer wants but allowing foreign manufacturers to again beat us at a game that we decades ago invented.

Thus the urgent need to turn our civic attention to the real stuff.