No More Incumbents Blog

There is a classic way to create and maintain a co-dependent relationship. 

1. Push a person or group out of their comfort zone
2. Take away their resources and escape plans
3. Then give them just a little bit to get buy and avoid total collapse

One and two have happened for millions of Americans already as they suffered the 1, 2 and 3 punches of Real Estate Value collapse, Unemployment, and Credit Evaporation.

The government provides an old fashioned and mostly broken unemployment system that rarely covers most newly unemployed individuals, but for those that it does cover, it doesn’t really provide enough assistance to buy groceries and gas let alone cover a house payment or car payment or any other bills.

So Barack Obama is calling on Congress to extend the paltry unemployment benefits of Americans that will lose them in the next couple of months. 

President-elect Barack Obama urged Congress to extend unemployment benefits as part of a “down payment” on a U.S. economic rescue plan as world leaders meet in Washington today to fight the global recession.

Extended assistance “for the more than 1 million Americans who will have exhausted their unemployment insurance by the end of this year” is an immediate priority, Obama said in the Democratic Party’s weekly radio address.

Bloomberg.com: Politics

Its a nice-nice effort, but not going to make life better for anyone really.  It will not put anyone back in a job.  It will not even cover most bills, debts or necessities.  In reality it is less of a ‘down payment’ on the US rescue plan as it is an interest only payment.

Its also a nice sound bite, and business as usual as far as political tricks go.  Unfortunately, it won’t do anyone any good.  :(  People would get just as little out of this as spending their lass dime in Vegas on a slot machine, in fact go for it, you might have better odds with the house in vegas than you will from the White House of GWB or BHO.  Make your las vegas hotel reservations today, because tomorrow we’ll all be in the poor house if our leadership doesn’t come up with some better efforts than they have shown so far.

Here’s the scenario, the world is entering a Global Recession and facing off against the potential of a Global Depression.  So what do they do?

They set the wrong agenda.  See if you can spot the flaw in their leadership logic…

World leaders convened Saturday for a second straight day hoping to tackle a financial crisis that has ricocheted across the globe and left the United States and other countries on the brink of deep recessions.

Their goal: to prevent a similar calamity from happening again.

The historic two-day summit meeting, which brought together prime ministers and presidents from Group of 20 countries, was in full swing Saturday following an extravagant working dinner at the White House.

"We had a good frank discussion last night," President Bush said. "There’s some progress being made, but there’s still a lot more work to be done."

Global summit seeks ways to avoid next financial crisis - Nov. 15, 2008

OK, so what in the world are they doing making plans to avoid a similar problem?

This is supposedly a once per century problem.  A problem that we have not yet survived and they are looking into plans to figure out how to avoid it next century?

Hello!  Leaders of the world, I’ve got a news flash for you.  How about you confront the problem we have today.  The problem that your poor leadership could not avoid.  How about you chart us a path out of this problem instead of pretending we don’t have a problem now.

I realize many of you already have the shipping boxes open on your office desks and you are hoping to high tail it to the nearest possible remote location away from the future turmoil, but you are still in a position of power.  Is it too much to ask for some last minute game play here?

The Senate voted 97 to 1 today to stopping saving 70,000 barrels of oil per day in the ‘Strategic’ Oil Reserve.  The Oil Reserve is kind of like a Santa Saver Account for Oil, but like many Santa Saver accounts it is massively under funded.

Surprise, Surprise, the US Government under funded something.

The US consumes about 21,000,000 barrels of oil per day.  Saving 70,000 barrels per day, is kind of like a keep the change program on your credit card, where your purchases are rounded up to the nearest dollar and the change goes into a savings account.  You are never going to get rich from this and you are never going to have much of a safety net.

That’s pretty much how it is with the Oil Reserve.  We have managed to save up 702,000,000 barrels of oil over more than 10,000 days.  702 million may sound like an impressive number.

Its only about 35 days worth of oil consumption for the US.

That means that if a hurricane hit the gulf, our pipeline in Alaska stopped pumping oil, and we lost all other sources of oil (say in a war or something), the US would only have 35 days worth of oil to keep things like cars, freight, trains, planes, the military and some power plants running.

That’s not strategic, that’s tactical.  Strategic would include obtaining new sources of power.  This is barely as good as a 30 minute backup generator when your lights go out for 2 weeks during a winter ice storm.  Regardless, it would appear that it could be curtains for the US Strategic Oil Reserve.

The preceding posts included a conversation that I was involved in at Utterz.com, a social networking site.  I wanted to experiment with sharing this segment of the conversation here at NoMoreIncumbents.org and looking into the potential for some cross germination of ideas and discussion based on the topic.

You can find the first through the seventh post in the series as follows:

1. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else Part 1
2. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else -Part 2
3. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else-Part 3
4. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else-Part 4
5. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else-Part 5
6. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else-Part 6
7. Oil Hits $117, Effects Cost of Everything Else-Part 7

As the conversation develops at Utterz, I will work to keep everyone here up on the conversation.  You are more than welcome to hop over there and join directly into the conversation as well, whatever is easiest for you.  The Utterz community is friendly and open and easy to use and doesn’t require any special invitations, hand shakes, funny hats or equestrian clothing for fox hunts on Sunday or anything.

Come as you are whenever you like however you like and share your perspective and we will all be better for the conversation.