Clueless Leadership and Political Pandering

To Selfish Interests Yields Unintended Consequences

One blessing and the curse of having a 157 IQ is that problems which seem unsolvable to most appear to have very simple and obvious solutions to me.

 I’m sure others find it quite tedious and insufferable to listen to my frequent corrections and rantings upon the mental deficiencies of our leaders, but I pray just once you could all view the long tragedy of man’s existence upon this planet thru my eyes.

Born into a garden, we’ll not stop to think until we have turned it all into desert.

After 2000 years of Christianity, we should know how we cause our own problems.

After 232 years of liberty in self-determination thru a brilliantly designed republican system of governance, we should have no problems left to solve.

After 9/11, I had great hopes that Americans were ready to return to the Protestant Christian ethic that gave to all mankind this great nation, this beacon of light and hope in a world full of darkness, despair and destruction. That love fest sure didn’t last very long! Now, we are back to the same selfishness and petty partisan political squabbling that has kept man from making any real progress for the last two millennia.

The ultra-liberals want us to make war on the dirty capitalist rich, take their money, make us all support those who contribute nothing but unruly babies to society, give free health care to those who won’t even care for themselves, and keep those evil oil companies from drilling, or even exploring, anywhere, at all cost; ultra-conservatives would have us ignore every ill that pure greed gives us, subsidize a nuke power plant or auction off.an oil drilling lease even on the White House lawn.

Can’t we find some sensible common ground in between these extremist positions?

Just like the ‘greens’ were wrong about the Alaska pipeline hurting the wildlife it has actually proven to help, they are wrong about clean, modern directional oil drilling technology’s likely effect upon the ecology of ANWR. It is public land, so we can dictate exactly how careful the oil companies must be in exploring and exploiting this public resource, and where that oil must go when it is pumped out (Asia has been the only beneficiary of our investment in the Alaska Oil Pipeline). They also say it would be 10 years till we see a drop of that oil, and that’s what they have said for 21 years!

They are also wrong about the effects of opening these reserves to exploration – they say there is not enough oil there to make a significant difference, but in their infinite wisdom and religious-like zeal they have continually blocked even complete exploration of the area. So how do they know this, are they also prophets? Yet, the opening of just the known oil reserves in ANWR would immediately drive many speculators out of the market (who selfishly added $60 to a barrel of crude over actual demand in recent months), driving down the price, taking money away from terrorists, and saving the global economy from a very sure and painful depression.

Of course, the left is right that more oil is not a cure for our oil addiction. There is no one cure for such a huge problem. We must take every sensible action to keep this economy alive while effecting the cure to our foreign oil addiction, now!

We need exploration and exploitation of all of our own fossil energy resources, construction of pipelines and clean refineries, as well as more efficient and more flexible personal and mass transit schemes, conservation of all kinds, conversion to alternative and renewable energy resources wherever possible, and, most immediately, to install clean hybrid coal and biomass burning technologies on new and retrofit powerplants.

No more partisanship, no more refusals to compromise, and no more excuses!

Everbody Has An Opinion

Americans are world-famous for all having opinions on subjects they know little or nothing about, so much so that the Canadians made a very successful TV show entirely dedicated to laughing at this peculiar flaw in us.

Listening to the 3 remaining presidential and other major party candidates bloviate upon every subject in their political quivers reminds me of that comedy show.

None of these ‘court jesters’ have a clue of what has caused all of the problems we have facing us today, and nearly every change they propose would only make matters worse.

The Health Care proposals of all remaining candidates seem farcical to anyone, like myself, who has lived both in countries with Socialized Medical Care, and with ‘free markets’ in pharmaceuticals. I can tell you that a truly ‘free’ market solves problems, and government causes problems. If Americans ever get Socialized Medicine, they will surely wish they never had, but it is hard to get rid of once the mistake is made.

Now, John McCain and Hillary Clinton are both committing themselves to a federal gas tax “holiday”, which is one more example of perfect political pandering to all the ‘little people’, but will accomplish absolutely nothing of value to anyone.

Obama wants to borrow more money from the Chinese, so he can give you one more rebate check, and then you can buy one more Chinese TV from Walmart, or three more tanks of gas from the Arabs.

Almost all Democrats, and their presidential candidates, want a windfall profits tax on oil companies, which has been tried before, was an absolute disaster, and would be again.

What was that definition of insanity, again?

It reminds me of what Thoreau said, “For every one of man’s problems, there are a thousand men chopping at the branches for every one chopping at the roots.”

These ‘weed pruners’ need to spend time walking a bean field or cutting thistles in a pasture to learn the basics about cause and effect in the real world!

Most “environmentalists” also need this kind of reality-based educational experience to learn that the way that might seem right to the untrained eye often causes more problems than it solves, and that every human is not the ‘enemy’.

Farmers were the first biologists and the first ecologists. For over 5000 years, they have been studying Nature and helping her everywhere they can to make life better for all.

For 30 years the liberals, tree huggers and carrot killers have whined for renewable fuels, while they continued to buy petroleum at the pump and ungratefully cuss the oil companies - blaming them for providing what we all demand. Now that tax credits have finally given us ethanol and biodiesel, they don’t like either anymore, because now all of us can’t afford bread, tortillas, milk, meat, or cooking oil.

High food prices hurt poor folks, and people living on fixed incomes, the worst.

By the way, rice, wheat, and every other starchy grain can just as easily be used to substitute for corn in ethanol plants, or in animal feeds, which is just one reason they have all been going up in price, together, but the farmer’s share of that $4 box of corn flakes is still only about 10¢. The package costs about 3 times that. The cost of shipping “sugar-coated puffed air” great distances across the country is highly significant, as well as the profit required to pay company executives millions in salaries and bonuses.

More subsidies to top-heavy big businesses are not a good answer. Recent ethanol over-development should show us that big business is the most self-serving and the least responsive to the actual needs of our society and small business creates more jobs per dollar invested. Though we would still have no wind power today without those heavy government subsidies to big business, it is not because wind won’t pay in small scales, but because utilities have too much power and politicians won’t buck them. They don’t like wind, and they control the price!

Wind is fickle and doesn’t come in the peak demand hours when they want it.

Nothing can change that; we must force the utilities to offer the same price to all small producers that they pay each other for power, change the REA Charter to allow local REC’s to purchase power directly from members, as well as their regional provider, and learn to match off-peak demand to use the wind when it comes!

Wind comes later than peak demand, so you transmit the excess to the West. Wind increases wind chill and air exchange from buildings, so it is a perfect match for space heating, and some cooling. Wind increases plant transpiration, animal perspiration and evaporation, so it is a perfect match for water pumping; it also often comes at night, which is the right time to irrigate. Many other automated high energy demands like chemical fertilizer manufacture, hydrogen fuel production and carbon sequestration can be turned on, or increased, automatically when the wind comes.

We don’t need hundreds of huge wind turbines owned by big utilities, anyway, we need millions of small ones owned by all of us. When one out of a million is struck by lightning, or ripped out of the ground by a tornado, nobody notices, but when one out of a hundred goes down that’s an immediate 1% cut in production. The use of small, low-technology wind turbines has proven viable on these plains for 150 years.

Changing the REA Charter would also make it possible for thousands of farmers to install millions of small hydroelectric plants, biogas/electric generators, and biomass co-generator systems, as well as wind turbines, under profitable conditions.

Saving Us From Ourselves

The best way of saving fuel, reducing your food bill, and breaking the power of big business over every facet of our lives, immediately, is to refuse to buy from them, but instead, buy what is produced locally. There is nothing Iowa soil and Iowans can’t produce for ourselves.

If any of our leaders, including co-op leaders, had any visionary grasp of our problems, they would have built mills here to add value to our grain crops, milk, meats and eggs decades ago. We cannot turn back time, but we can reinvigorate the cooperative spirit that conquered the plains, and do now what we should have done then.

If we had real leadership in this country, all of our ethanol plants would be wet milling plants to produce sugars, starches, celluloses, alcohols, oils, plastics and other valuable nutritional and chemical components, built to feed CO2, waste heat and water to adjoining greenhouses, alongside matching dairies and beef feedlots to consume the by-products and feed manure to a biogas generator, which, in turn, feeds nutrients, energy, waste heat and CO2 back to the greenhouse.

We did not need 60 giant ethanol and biodiesel plants in Iowa, consuming more corn than we produce, but 400 smaller plants integrated with 400 small dairies and 400 small feedlots, with 400 biogas generators, along with 400 small milk, meat and egg plants and 400 cereal, flour, bread, cookie, cracker and corn chip plants, in the hands of Iowans, would have solved many more problems for our society. Better late than never!

The ‘greens’ also now belatedly claim that it takes 2.5 Btu’s of energy to provide a car with 1 Btu of ethanol, counting every Btu from harvest to harvest thru distillation to the gas pump, but what they don’t tell you is that it has always taken 3 or more Btu’s of energy to bring your car just 1 Btu of gasoline. So grain ethanol alone can boast a 17% increase in thermal efficiency over current oil cracking technology.

Increasing ethanol fuel blends to 20% would save us 3.5% in energy over gasoline. With an existing multi-fuel system that GM refuses to sell in America, we could burn all E85 that would save us 14% in energy over straight gasoline. No small potatoes, even if we do not attach some value to the cleaner air that burning ethanol gives us!

If we made ethyl alcohol from sugars of sweet sorghum, Jerusalem artichokes, sugar beets and sugar cane instead of starches from grains that savings would be greater yet!

The mere connection of current dry milling grain ethanol plants with a cattle operation and a biogas generator has proven to change the plant energy equation from a positive 1 Btu energy input to 1.3 Btu ethanol output to a vastly improved 1 Btu energy input for every 43.67 Btu’s of ethanol produced!

It is foolhardy meddling in the marketplace with tax and regulatory policies pushed by those ‘true believers’ in government power that has caused the inequitable and unsustainable development of the ethanol industry from 1791 to today.

I wish we could just eliminate all taxes and regulation, today, and expect the free market to return to normalcy, but far too many extreme inequities have developed from the foolish application of the coercive power of government. These will not rectify themselves without more taxes that will undo the damage. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle!

All of this should serve to teach us one fundamental and irrefutable truth; if you want to discourage something, tax it; if you want to encourage something, cut taxes on it.

When our leaders say there is nothing we can do about the market price of oil, they only prove that they are either too corrupt, or too inept, to deserve our vote.

If we want to lower the price of oil, we need only to eliminate speculation by placing a 70% punitive tax on purely speculative earnings, this would not hurt, but only help, any legitimate, productive business, and would cut oil prices in half, over night.

Of course there would be a great outcry from the likes of George Soros and T. Boone Pickens, but these filthy rich parasites have caused enough suffering to all in this world already, and they will have no problem finding other legitimate investments.

There would be many economists speak against it, most just trying to justify their own speculative investments, others merely confused as to the true utility of the “liquidity” they claim that speculation serves to add to markets. They will all soon realize that we never lacked “liquidity” in these markets, in the first place. It is impossible to lack liquidity in a market for commodities essential to all humans.

If we want to completely solve our food and energy problems, we must put an end to welfare for wealthy land owners and paying for non-production in the farm bill. These programs have not added stability, but only more volatility, to the farm markets. We should limit all welfare for farmers to no more than $50,000/yr. We should restrict all government subsidies for business only to corporate entities that are open to the public and governed by one man, one vote, essentially, open co-ops. We should eliminate the ethanol blender’s tax credit on grain alcohol, but keep it on for cellulosic and sugar ethanols to encourage the conversion of our excess grain ethanol production capacity to more sustainable feedstocks. We must reduce taxes and import duties on all clean, renewable energies and augment taxes and import duties on dirty fossil fuels and all petroleum derivatives according to their carbon content. We must institute high export duties on all energies and highly progressive taxes on gas guzzling vehicles and energy hog appliances, decreasing as energy efficiency increases. We must create a luxury tax on conspicuous consumption and a revolving loan fund for small businesses and the working poor to purchase energy-efficient vehicles and appliances with progressively decreasing down payments and interest rates for increasing efficiency ratings.

I would be happy to explain exactly how and why each of these actions should be taken, if anyone has a further interest in understanding the logic.

Listening to the ‘greens’, now that they have changed their minds about ethanol, would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Government pandering to some of these mental midgets with a professed passion for preserving all things “natural”, but with a demonstrated hatred for all things human is the problem, not the solution.

I am as dedicated to the protection of God’s Creation as anyone on Earth, but humans are an integral part of that Creation; unless we are willing to start killing humans, then we had better figure out how to control our environment, raise more food, and transport it to feed the 6.5 billion people on this planet, and those billions more to come.

The increased CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases in our air that we blame for global warming have also increased crop yields to help us feed more humans than have ever lived before till now, whether we add more, or natural forces do, those same gases could take us over the brink of an ecological collapse that might threaten the existence of the human race, as well as nearly every other animal on this planet.

Luckily, there are no real problems without real solutions, but all require planning and preparation to effect!

I am holding a Patriot’s Picnic on the Aden Family Trust Farm at 2694 180^th Street, near Nemaha, from May 30 thru June 1, for all of us to discuss what can and should be done to elect good leaders and develop real solutions to cure our very real problems.

You may find more information by logging on to www.wecansolveit.org/page/event/detail/jwc, or call me at 712-636-4490, or e-mail me at lmaden@frontiernet.net, if you intend to attend this gathering and join us in taking steps toward real change in our local communities, our beloved country, and our beautiful planet.

I invite all concerned citizens to come, listen, and express your viewpoint.

Nothing good will come from sitting around and blaming the other guy for the what we are all guilty of – living, breathing, eating, drinking, and going to work!

We surely are our own worst enemies, but we are also masters of our own destiny!

Let’s do some mastering!