An Open Letter to Sen. Obama

Dear Sen. Obama,

You are losing me. Not because of your skin color – it is irrelevant. Not because of Rev. Wright – he is truly entitled to his opinions. Not because you have been portrayed as an elitist, but maybe you should shop at a 99-cent store for groceries every now and again just to see how many people are forced to buy their food there and what they are buying.
No, you are losing me because I want change. Real change. Not lip service to a national health-care system or limits on what kinds of vehicles we can drive. We are being filleted (not flayed) alive by our elected officials and everyone else who supports the status quo. We sent $300,000,000,000.00 -- $300 billion -- out of our country in 2007 and will send close to $500 billion – half a trillion dollars! – this year. Just to pay our oil bill. Calling this "unsustainable" is to put a smiley face on it. Calling it outrageous, stupid and insane is closer to reality.
We need an alternative to oil NOW. We have needed it for 40 years. We haven’t gotten it because we have a cravenly coward Congress whose members’ primary concern seems to be appeasement of big oil, big pharma and big insurance in order to prevent these special interests from funding their opponents. Lift the tariff on imported ethanol until we can get southern Louisiana producing enough sugar cane to make enough ethanol to support us and watch how fast oil prices will fall. Then, instead of treating us like peasants, let’s see a mandate requiring that all government vehicles get 40 miles per gallon. You lead, we will follow. Until then, I want to see bans continued on drilling for any fossil fuels in any environmentally sensitive areas, a moratorium on adding to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the $40 billion a year we collect from fuel taxes spent on our highways. Then raise the fuel tax and use-permit fees on foreign trucks until the revenue raised equals their share of upkeep of our infrastructure.
And all those jobs that you said are never coming back to the heartland? That is a sure bet with the current policies we have. But I believe they could come back. Get national health insurance in place and watch how fast Ford, GM, Chrysler and Caterpillar profits rise. And to hell with China. Why are we selling out to them? We have more than paid their overhead to industrialize. Cut them off like a trust-fund slacker. Tell them we will reconsider when their products and behavior meet our standards. Maybe. In the meantime, let’s get serious about enforcement of intellectual-property and industrial-espionage laws.
Then tell me why, if it is in our interest to support capitalist democracies, that China now holds what amounts to a mortgage on our economy that it could foreclose at will? China holds $363 billion in U.S. debt obligations,2 nearly twice that of No. 2 Japan’s $200 billion. China is not a capitalist democracy in any sense of our own experience of what this term means. The answer is that the administration is using China as a "home equity" credit line to finance the absolutely wrong war in Iraq and the continuing standoff in Afghanistan just to keep ruinous tax cuts in place for those who need them least.
So please, Senator, please, do not pull the Jimmy Carter cardigan of malaise out the closet and tell us to turn down the thermostat. Whoever controls energy – starting now – will set the geopolitical agenda until a truly sustainable global solution is in place. That may take decades. In the meantime, we cannot afford to have the terms of global politics dictated to us by the – currently – energy-rich nations. When 82 percent of Americans say we are on the wrong track, much of that sentiment derives from our perceived decline in power. And not world power, but domestic power: the ability to determine our own future without outside interference; the ability to be strong enough to stand up for those who need our help, and; the ability to serve as an example of why our particular interpretation of what a democratic republic should be is worthy of emulation.