Seeing Secretary of Energy Chu respond to the question about high gas prices suddenly brought something into focus. Asked about the price of gas today he talked about natural gas, electrification and biofuel. None of these, literally none, have any ability to impact the average car owner in the country for decades. It’s as if someone went to an auto mechanic to have his car fixed and got a lecture on the design of the car of the future. The disassociation from reality was jarring. That’s when it hit me. Chu was truly not interested in the here-and-now, his eye was firmly fixed on a world of his own imagination. Like Bill Ayers who bombed the Pentagon for peace, what happens to people on the journey to Utopia has no meaning. With the exceptions of the original revolt against Britain and the Civil War, Americans are accustomed to political compromises, to incremental changes. With Obama we are actually living through a time when the ruling class wants to radically transform our society and has the power to do it.
Few people who voted in 2008 really believed that they were electing someone who was determined to change America beyond recognition. What they got was an administration that’s is acting remarkably like China under Mao during “The Great Leap Forward” - and the USSR with its “Five Year Plans.” Those countries were run by autocrats, with the objective of radically transforming society. In the case of China and the USSR the objective was to leapfrog in five years what the Western countries had done in a hundred years. In one spectacular example, Mao planned to transform the steel industry by having people in the countryside create thousands of home built steel smelting plants.
During the Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958 to 1961, China's leaders attempted to accelerate collectivization and dramatically increase the pace of industrial production throughout the country, particularly in rural areas. This mostly involved small-scale production, such as the smelting of "backyard" steel. It was thought that through collectivization and mass labour, China's steel production would surpass that of the United Kingdom within only 15 years from the start of the "leap."
An experimental commune was established in Henan early in 1958, and soon communes spread throughout the country. Tens of millions were mobilised to produce a single commodity that was symbolic of industrialisation—steel. Approximately 25,000 communes were set-up, each with around 5,000 households. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery. Small backyard steel furnaces were built in every commune where peasants produced small nuggets of cast iron made from scrap metal. Simultaneously, peasants communities were collectivised.
The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen, both within and outside China, as a major economic disaster. Peasants often abandoned farming to produce steel or work in other industrial production. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years," the Three Years of Natural Disasters (although this name is now rarely used in China), and the Great Leap Famine, as the Chinese people suffered from extreme shortages of food. The period had a profound impact on the history of rural life in China.
The impulse behind the Obama administration is similar. Rush Limbaugh has called Obama “cold.” It takes a cold man, someone who does not count the misery, to try to transform America no matter what the human cost.
Think of a rational reason why a national leader in a free country would squander time and political resources during a time of severe economic stress by focusing relentlessly on transforming the national medical system, one with which 80% or more of the people were satisfied, while only paying lip service to the millions of unemployed and those who were losing their homes?
Think of a reason why a democratic government tries to develop entirely new technologies that will take decades to arrive while simultaneously doing everything it can to inhibit new oil exploration driving oil prices up. The objective, of course, is to make carbon fuels so expensive that alternatives will become economically competitive. But this assumes that the new technologies will work. In the meantime the families living paycheck to paycheck are not only suffering today, but will suffer more tomorrow and for decades thereafter with absolutely no guarantee that the technological dreams of the apparatchiks in Washington will ever become reality.
Obama, the politician will find someone to blame just as Stalin found the “wreckers” and Mao the “rightists” who were always standing in the way of the goal becoming a reality. Today he’s out giving speeches explaining that it’s simply impossible to bring gasoline prices down to levels they were only a year ago. The answer is not that it’s impossible but that it’s not part of the plan. Gasoline price have to be high, possibly two to five times today’s levels to make the “alternative” energy sources anywhere close to competitive.
But it takes the functionaries below Obama to drive the machine and there is no clearer example than Dr. Chu, a lifelong academic for whom theory is everything, in his reply to the congressional committee. There was not even the hint that he really cared for the suffering of the people, the ones whose cars ran on gasoline as he doubled down on the dream, a world of the imagination, a world without fossil fuels and the hell with the people who would not live to see it. That’s why Chu’s answer, which was honestly given, for once, was so chilling. In the world of ideology, in the alternative universe of academia, people are not flesh and blood but pawns. And anyone who has ever played chess knows that pawns are expendable.
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