This is one of the latest going around, it looks as though it originated in the South -- probably at the hand of Karl Rove himself, attacking Jimmy Carter and the formation of the Energy Department -- in order to forestall action on regulation of our nation's financial industry, stimulating our economy and reforming health care:
Does anybody out there have any memory
Of the reason given for the establishment
Of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
During the Carter Administration?
Anybody?
• Anything?
• No?
• Didn't think so!
Bottom line ...
We've spent several hundred billion dollars
In support of an agency .... the reason
For which not one person who reads this can remember. Ready???????
It was very simple ..
And at the time everybody thought
It very appropriate...
The 'Department of Energy'
Was instituted on 8-04-1977
TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.
Hey, pretty efficient, huh?????
AND NOW IT'S 2010, 32 YEARS LATER ...
AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS NECESSARY DEPARTMENT
IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR, IT HAS 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES
AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES
AND LOOK AT THE JOB IT HAS DONE !
THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY
'WHAT WAS I THINKING?'
Ah, yes, good old bureaucracy...
And NOW _ we are going to turn The Banking System, Health Care and The Auto Industry over to the government.ALL IN THE NAME OF CHANGE?
May God Help Us !!!
Keep this one going..
DON'T keep this one going!
And, if you get one, refer everyone receiving it to Thom Hartmann's blog:
http://www.commondreams.org/...
When Carter had become president ... the nation was still recovering from the "oil shock" of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and scientists were realizing our nation was just then hitting the point of domestic peak oil production predicted more than a decade earlier by scientist M. King Hubbert. (The rest of the world is hitting the Hubbert Peak right now.) As Carter noted in his speech, "The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation's independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained." Hubbert had predicted that the peak of oil production for the USA would come in the 1970s, and it did, hitting us with a shock.
Carter's speech drew a strong reaction from the Saudis and the oil industry. Think tanks soon emerged - many whose names are today familiar - to suggest there was really no energy problem, and they led the charge to establish a permanent right-wing media in the US. Within two years, Saudi citizen and oil baron Salem bin Laden's sole US representative, James Bath, would funnel cash into the failing business of the son of the CIA's former director, political up-and-comer George H. W. Bush. With that money from the representative of Osama Bin Laden's half-brother, George Bush Jr. was able to keep afloat his Arbusto ("shrub" in Spanish) Oil Company. And he would be in the pocket of the bin Laden and Saudi interests for the rest of his life. But Carter was incorruptible.
.... Two years later, as the bin Laden family's sole US representative was bailing out George Bush Junior's failing oil business, Jimmy Carter gave another speech on energy, further refining his national energy policy. He had already started the national strategic petroleum reserve, birthed the gasohol and solar power industries, and helped insulate millions of homes and offices. But he wanted to go a step further. "I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States," Carter said on July 15, 1979. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s..." In addition, we needed to immediately begin to develop a long-range strategy to move beyond fossil fuel.
Too bad we believed it when Jimmy Carter was so shamelessly discredited by right wing media and think tanks.