Brilliant talk by Hunter Lovins, author of Natural Capitalism.  One point I'd like to emphasize is that her illustrations of the shortcomings of the "free market" occurred precisely because our governmental structures have actually reward economic and thus ecological stupidity. The word "Economics" comes from the Greek oekonomia which means "the administration of one's household." All living beings are economic entities, but the coercive interference of government in our economy is precisely what has subsidized stupidity.  To me, the automobile is a case in point.  What would transportation look like if government hadn't artificially protected automakers from the structural and operational costs, such as the huge waste of land for highways and the huge loss of human life and health from accidents, pollution, etc.?  As Hunter points out, alternative fuel sources are not competing in a free market because nuclear and coal-fired electrical plants receive huge subsidies and mandated lower interest rates than alternative energy production.  I am not sold on the human-caused climate change paradigm, but there is no doubt that human impact on the natural environment is decimating biodiversity, accelerating disease, etc. 

For me, part of the key is REMOVING government mandates, rather than imposing new ones. 

Anyways, this is a brilliant talk and I hope you'll enjoy it:

Between the Rhythm and the Dance
The Heart Communes Entirely
The Rest is Confusion
Taste!

©2008 Little Big O

A liberal is someone who feels a

 

great debt to his fellow man, which

 

debt he proposes to pay off with your money.

 

 Please share this email with everybody. Time is short.

 Thanks for investing your time in reading Cory's message. It’s long but very important. Thanks again Cory for your courage and for standing up for what is right!

 

A lot of political emails are being passed around and it is hard to know which ones are true and which ones are made up.  Well I can assure you this one is true because I live it every day.  It's worth the time to read it, even if you don't agree!

 Cory

 

Mr. Obama,

 

    Given the uproar about the simple question asked you by Joe the plumber, and the persecution that has been heaped on him because he dared to question you, I find myself motivated to say a few things to you myself.  While Joe aspires to start a business someday, I already have started not one, but 4 businesses.  But first, let me introduce myself.  You can call me "Cory the well driller".   I am a 54 year old high school graduate.  I didn't go to college like you, I was too ready to go "conquer the world" when I finished high school.  25 years ago at age 29, I started my own water well drilling business at a time when the economy here in East Texas was in a tailspin from the crash of the early 80's oil boom.  I didn't get a ny help from the government, nor did I look for any.  I borrowed what I could from my sister, my uncle, and even the pawn shop and managed to scrape together a homemade drill rig and a few tools to do my first job.  My businesses did not start not a result of privilege.  It is the result of my personal drive, personal ambition, self discipline, self reliance, and a determination to treat my customers fairly.  From the very start my business provided one other (than myself) East Texan a full time job.  I couldn't afford a backhoe the first few years (something every well drilling business had), so I and my helper had to dig the mud pits that are necessary for each and every job with hand shovels.  I had to use my 10 year old, 1/2 ton pickup truck for my water tank truck (normally a job for at least a 2 ton truck). 

 

    A year and a half after I started the business, I scraped together a 20% down payment to get a modest bank loan and bought a (28 year) old, worn out, slightly bigger drilling rig to allow me to drill the deeper water wells in my area.  I spent the next few years drilling wells with the rig while simultaneously rebuilding it between jobs.  Through these years I never knew from one month to the next if I would have any work or be able to pay the bills.  I got behind on my income taxes one year, and spent the next two years paying that back (with penalty and interest) while keeping up with ongoing taxes.  I got behind on my water well supply bill 2 different years (way behind the second time... $80,000.00), and spent over a year paying it b ack (each time) while continuing to pay for ongoing supplies C.O.D..  Of course, the personal stress endured through these experiences and years is hard to measure.  I do have a stent in my heart now to memorialize it all.

 

    I spent the next 10 years developing the reputation for being the most competent and most honest water well driller in East Texas .  2 years along the way, I hired another full time employee for the drilling business so that we could provide full time water well pump service as well as the well drilling.  Also, 3 years along the path, I bought a water well screen service machine from a friend, starting business # 2.  5 years later I made a business loan for $100,000.00 to build a new, higher production, computer controlled screen service machine.  I had designed the machine myself, and it didn't work out for 3 years so I had to make the loan payments without the benefit of any added income from the new machine.  No government program was there to help me with the payments, or to help me sleep at night a s I lay awake wondering how I would solve my machine problems or pay my bills.  Finally, after 3 years, I got the screen machine working properly, and that provided another full time job for an East Texan in the screen service business.  

 

    2 years after that, I made another business loan, this time for $250,000.00, to buy another used drilling rig and all the support equipment needed to run another, larger, drill rig.  This provided another 2 full time jobs for East Texans.  Again, I spent a couple of years not knowing if I had made a smart move, or a move that would bankrupt me.  For the third time in 13 years, I had placed everything I owned on the line, risking everything, in order to build a business. 

 

    A couple of years into this, I came up with a bright idea for a new kind of mud pump, a fundamentally necessary pump used on water well drill rigs.  I spent my entire life savings to date (just $30,000.00), building a prototype of the pump and took it to the national water well convention to show it off.  Customers immediately started coming out of the woodworks to buy the pumps, but there was a problem.  I had depleted my assets making the prototype, and nobody would make me a business loan to start production of the new pumps.  With several deposits for pump orders in hand, and nowhere to go, I finally started applying for as many credit card as I could find and took cash withdrawals on these cards to the tune of over $150,000.00 (including modest loans from my dear sister and brother), to get this 3^rd business going. 

 

    Yes, once again, I had everything hanging over the line in an effort to start another business.  I had never manufactured anything, and I had to design and bring into production a complex hydraulic machine from an untested prototype to a reliable production model (in six months).  How many nights I lay awake wondering if I had just made the paramount mistake of my life I cannot tell you, but there were plenty.  I managed to get the pumps into production, which immediately created another 2 full time jobs in East Texas .  Some of the models in the first year suffered from quality issues due to the poor workmanship of one of my key suppliers, so I and an employee (another East Texan employed) had to drive across the country to repair customers' pumps, practically from coast to coast.  I stood behind the product, an d made payments to all the credit cards that had financed me (and my brother and sister).  I spent the next 5 years improving and refining the product, building a reputation for the pump and the company, working to get the pump into drill rig manufacturers' product lines, and paying back credit cards.  During all this time I continued to manage a growing water well business that was now operating 3 drill rig crews, and 2 well service crews.  Also, the screen service business continued to grow.  No government programs were there to help me, Mr. Obama, but that's ok, I didn't expect any, nor did I want any.  I was too busy fighting to make success happen to sit around waiting for the government to help me.     

 

    Now, we have been manufacturing the mud pumps for 7 years, my combined businesses employ 32 full time employees, and distribute $5,000,000.00 annually through the local economy.  Now, just 4 months ago I borrowed $1,254,000.00, purchasing computer controlled machining equipment to start my 4th business, a production machine shop.  The machine shop will serve the mud pump company so that we can better manufacture our pumps that are being shipped worldwide.  Of course, the machine shop will also do work for outside companies as well.  This has already produced 2 more full time jobs, and 2 more should develop out of it in the next few months.  This should work out, but if it doesn't it will be because you, and the other professional politicians like yourself, will have destroyed our countrys ' (and the world) economy with your meddling with mortgage loan programs through your liberal manipulation and intimidation of loaning institutions to make sure that unqualified borrowers could get  mortgages.  You see, at the very time when I couldn't get a business loan to get my mud pumps into production, you were working with Acorn and the Community Reinvestment Act programs to make sure that unqualified borrowers could buy homes with no down payment, and even no credit or worse yet, bad credit.  Even the infamous, liberal, Ninja loans (No Income, No Job or Assets).  While these unqualified borrowers were enjoying unrealistically low interest rates, I was paying 22% to 24% interest on the credit cards that I had used to provide me the funds for the mud pump business that has created jobs for more East Texans.  It's funny, because after 25 years of turning almost every dime of extra mone y back into my businesses to grow them, it has been only in the last two years that I have finally made enough money to be able to put a little away for retirement, and now the value of that has dropped 40% because of the policies you and your ilk have perpetrated on our country. 

 

    You see, Mr. Obama, I'm the guy you intend to raise taxes on.  I'm the guy who has spent 25 years toiling and sweating, fretting and fighting, stressing and risking, to build a business and get ahead.  I'm the guy who has been on the very edge of bankruptcy more than a dozen times over the last 25 years, and all the while creating more and more jobs for East Texans who didn't want to take a risk, and wouldn't demand from themselves what I have demanded from myself.  I'm the guy you characterize as "the Americans who can afford it the most" that you believe should be taxed more to provide income redistribution "to spread the wealth" to those who have never toiled, sweated, fretted, fought, stressed, or risked anything.   You want to char acterize me as someone who has enjoyed a life of privilege and who needs to pay a higher percentage of my income than those who have bought into your entitlement culture.  I resent you, Mr. Obama, as I resent all who want to use class warfare as a tool to advance their political career.  What's worse, each year more Americans buy into your liberal entitlement culture, and turn to the government for their hope of a better life instead of themselves.  Liberals are succeeding through more than 40 years of collaborative effort between the predominant liberal media, and liberal indoctrination programs in the public school systems across our land.

 

    What is so terribly sad about this is this.  America was made great by people who embraced the one-time American culture of self reliance, self motivation, self determination, self discipline, personal betterment, hard work, risk taking.  A culture built around the concept that success was in reach on every able bodied American who would strive for it.  Each year that less Americans embrace that culture, we all descend together.  We descend down the socialist path that has brought country after country ultimately to bitter and unremarkable states.  If you and your liberal comrades in the media and school systems would spend half as much effort cultivating a culture of can-do across America as you do cultivating your entitlement culture, we could see Americans at large embracing the conviction that they can elevate themselves through personal betterment, personal achievement, and self reliance.  You see, when people embrace such ideals, they act on them.  When people act on such ideals, they succeed.  All of America could find herself elevating instead of deteriorating.  But that would eliminate the need for liberal politicians, wouldn't it, Mr. Obama?  The country would not need you if the country was convinced that problem solving was best left with individuals instead of the government.  You and all your liberal comrades have got a vested interested in creating a dependent class in our country.  It is the very business of liberals to create an ever expanding dependence on government.  What's remarkable is that you, who have never produced a job in your life, are going to tax me to take more of my money and give it to people who wouldn't need my money if they would get off their entitlement mentality asses and apply themselves at work, demand more from themselves, and quit looking to liberal politicians to raise their station in life. 

 

You see, I know because I've had them work for me before.  Hundreds of them over these 25 years.  People who simply will not show up to work on time.  People who just will not work 5 days in a week, much less, 6 days.  People always looking for a way to put less effort out.  People who actually tell me that they would do more if I just would first pay them more.  People who take off work to sit in government offices to apply to get free government handouts (gee, I wonder how things would have turned out for them if they had spent that time earning money and pleasing their employer?).  Yo u see, all of this comes from your entitlement mentality culture. 

 

Oh, I know you will say I am uncompassionate.  Sorry, Mr. Obama, wrong again.  You see, I've seen what the average percentage of your income has been given to charities over the years of 2000 to 2004 (ignoring the years you started running for office - can you pronounce "politically motivated"), you averaged of less than 1% annually.  And your running mate, Joe Biden, averaged less than ¼% of his annual income in charitable contributions over the last 10 years.  Like so many liberals, the two of you want to give to the needy, just as long as it i s someone else's money you are giving to them.  I won't say what I have given to charities over the last 25 years, but the percentage is several times more than you or Joe Biden (don't you just hate Google?).  Tell me again how you feel my pain.

 

In short, Mr. Obama, your political philosophies represent everything that is wrong with our country.  You represent the culture of government dependence instead of self reliance;  Entitlement mentality instead of personal achievement;  Penalization of the successful to reward the unmotivated;  Political correctness instead of open mindedness and open debate.  If you are successful, you may preside over the final transformation of America from being the greatest and most self-reliant culture on earth, to just another country of whiners and wimps, who sit around looking to the government to solve their problems.  Like all of western Europe.  All countries on the decline.  All countries that, because of liberal socialistic mentalities, have a little less to offer mankind every year.

 

God help us...

 

Cory Miller

 

just a ordinary, extraordinary American, the way a lot of Americans used to be.

 

P.S. Yes, Mr. Obama, I am a real American...  www.cmillerdrilling.com 

Wonder why the Democrats kept supporting the war after their 2006 landslide win?
Wonder what kinds of plans Obama has for this nation?   Interesting Chief of Staff he picked.  :

http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh10242006.html

Ralph Nader, with whom I have profound disagreements in terms of his political philosophy, and for whom I have tremendous respect in terms of his contributions to the well-being of consumers in this country, and exposing corporate carelessness in relation to consumers, wrote a very interesting letter to Obama:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10809

Dear Senator Obama:

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity— not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.

You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas— the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."

During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.

David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President." Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. …Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"

In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp… with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.

Israeli writer and peace advocate, Uri Avnery, described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, th US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future— if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."

A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.

Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans— even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.

Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.

Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!

But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.

Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics — opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)— and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.

Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader