First of all, BP is not “British.” Hasn’t been for years. The world’s business community knows this, but the American news-media are still clueless about who owns BP, The Oil Giant Formerly Known As British Petroleum.

There is no doubt, however, about who owns Louisiana’s Republican governor Bobby Jindal (who is now blaming Obama for the BP oil-spill mess in the Gulf of Mexico)….

From Wikipedia:
“In 2006, Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act (H.R. 4761), a bill to eliminate the moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling over the U.S. outer continental shelf….Jindal argues that 30-40% of oil reserves of the United States are near the Louisiana coast and increased drilling would reduce American dependence on foreign oil. This prompted the watchdog groups, Republicans for Environmental Protection as well as the nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters to rate him among the lowest in Congress in 2006. H.R. 4761 was replaced by S 3711 (known as the Domenici-Landrieu Fair Share Plan) which was passed by both [Republican-led] houses of Congress and signed by President George W. Bush.”

There’s lots of oil-money stains on major politicians…. Palin, Obama, McCain, George W. Bush (& most of his cabinet). And there’s even more if you dig even just a little into British and American oil history.

The well-documented history and current existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons are widely accepted in the scientific community, but it would be political suicide for any American politician even to mention this subject before the international news-media.

Americans and Europeans willingly assume that Islamic countries would pose a risk to world peace if they obtained even a small nuclear-power plant; the irony is that many already do. But the idea that Israel would be hiding its own “nukes” (while calling on the USA, Europe, and the United Nations to sanction Iran, for example, for nuclear development and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is oddly difficult to accept.

In any event, if a country next to yours was secretly stockpiling nuclear weapons and had both long-distance missiles and jet bombers to deliver its nukes, what would you do? Of course, you’d threaten “Mutual Assured Destruction” — you buy or build your own nukes and aim them back toward your stealthy aggressive neighbor. It’s not intelligent, but we’re only human. Maybe this could be solved by a USA President inviting the quarrelsome neighbors to the White House for an informal “beer chat”?

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the USA House of Representatives, says that the Central Intelligence Agency, during their briefings to Congress, never mentioned planned “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture) of Muslim prisoners back when Dubya and the Dick Cheney were managing our foreign policy. In other words, the CIA “lied.” The horror! But seriously, was it their first time?

Consider for a moment that the CIA’s stated mission is simply to defend the USA. The agency gathers secret international “intelligence” which is then delivered to Congress and the President (or occasionally a sinister Vice President) even if their intent is on playing nasty tricks without a paper trail. Then the CIA is expected to keep their lips zipped. But there are also rumors, merely rumors, that the CIA is by now an international cartel of “private contractors” selling drugs, weapons, military coups, bootleg petroleum, assassinations, whatever makes money. Who knows?

I mention all this because our former President George W. Bush now has a good alibi for his Really Big Mistake….how come a handful of Saudi terrorists in 2001 were able to sneak into the USA, get “one-way” flight training for big airliners, then they hijacked some airliners and, among other accomplishments, knocked down BOTH of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. The CIA briefed Bush in detail about the probability of such plans more than month before the 9/11 attacks. After the briefing (at Bush’s Texas ranch), the President went fishing.

So here’s my point. There’s nothing more embarassing to a Texas cowboy than to get outright “bushwhacked,” especially considering how small the bushes are in Texas, and how hard it is for outlaws to hide behind them. You might even call them “shrubs” — the bushes, I mean. And there’s not much in the way of hills and mountains in Texas to hide behind, neither. So having someone get the drop on you is, well, mortifying!

And, hypothetically speaking, if a happy Texas rancher and his sidekick Dick were to get bushwhacked, don’t you think they’d spend the remainder of their lives wanting some revenge, maybe a lynching or a little torture here and there? And they’d forever after accuse their political opponents of being weak on “national security,” right? Not that it’s going to undo what happened on 9/11, but at least we could pretend that the CIA didn’t warn us?

In the painful aftermath of George W. Bush’s eight years as President of the USA, Americans have suddenly become interested again in “The Economy,” especially in that spicy sauce called “economic stimulus.” Younger voters must now pay, after the fact, for Bush’s faith-based financial planning.

Unfortunately, many Democrats who subsequently rode into power in Washington-DC with President Obama are now ready to throw taxpayer money in all directions, hoping that plentiful paper money on the ground will at least lift people’s spirits and trickle up through businesses and banks. Who knows? It could happen.

Meanwhile, Republicans who were not beaten into submission (or simply thrown out of office) in the last election have already begun calling for “more tax cuts!” This prescription, after eight years of Republican budget deficits and tax cuts which helped only the rich and emptied the U.S. Treasury, brings to mind the acronym “S.O.S.” — an expression favored by prison inmates when they are served the same old….food.

Sadly, most voters have trouble staying awake when TV commentators discuss economics, especially weird science like an “economic stimulus.” Worse, modern economists who could explain how these things work often have trouble communicating with the real world, and in any group of economists each seems to see things somewhat differently — rather like the ancient parable from India about six blind men who grasped different parts of an elephant and described the animal variously like a stone pillar, a rope, a tree branch, a handheld fan, a wall, or a thick pipe.

In September 1982, Scientific American Magazine published an entire special issue whose subject was The Mechanization of Work. Like so many important concepts found only in the best objective journalism, the big central idea in this magazine issue floated unnoticed over the talking heads in mainstream media. Pity, because much of what now torments the American economy was predicted by the Scientific American authors.

After an introductory article by Eli Ginzberg, the Scientific American issue included articles detailing how mechanization throughout modern history had made nearly all human endeavors (agriculture, mining, design and manufacturing, commerce, office work, women’s work) vastly more efficient and much less dependent on “employees.” Both the productivity increases and the labor decreases described were enormous. The last article concerning “distribution of work and income” explained calmly that highly-productive machinery, the concentration of factory ownership, and finally the near-elimination of human labor together mean that a modern industrialized economic system can no longer be managed automatically by market forces but instead must now include the forced recirculation of money to keep consumers active and the system running — or economic collapse and “social unrest” will ensue.

Laissez-faire, regulations-be-damned capitalists pondering the Scientific American conclusions will immediately erupt in anger, calling them “communism” or lazy “socialism” or much worse names. Do-gooder liberals (like myself) will strenuously object that a cold-blooded technical concept such as the “recirculation of money” in an economy ignores the true potential of democracy: benevolently sharing all wealth among all citizens, regardless of their “productivity” (this is merely a different recipe for disaster).

How does all this relate to President Obama, the United States Congress, and your wallet? We have already seen during the Bush years what happens to an economy: when wealth and ownership concentrate further among the already rich; when jobs disappear, pay less, or are merely sent overseas; when cheap imported goods replace domestically-made products; and when tax cuts for extremely wealthy individuals and hugely profitable corporations empty the public treasury. During this time, “high tech” information-processing and automation (such as robotic manufacturing) continued to make much human labor obsolete, so even fewer consumer became available to “keep the motor running.”

The hard truth revealed by the Scientific American issue The Mechanization of Work is that, whether you prefer greed or compassion when designing your economy, you can’t just let the system dry up and stop. Forget for a moment about home mortgages, the stock-market, affordable healthcare, alternative energy, and fuel-efficient cars. Whether an economy falters from technology-driven unemployment or from political mismanagement, the point is “Who can buy stuff anyway if they no longer have any income?”

Memo to Democrat big-government zealots: Always remember that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s successful economic-recovery plan didn’t just hand out money but created thousands of useful, good-paying jobs — many of them “permanent.”

Memo to Republican tax-cut enthusiasts: Do you really expect the thousands of voters who have lost their jobs, homes, retirement/pension funds, and kids’ inheritance to take you seriously? Voters will remember your promises of ”bi-partisan” government when the next Congressional elections take place. Have you been naughty or nice?