I have this stuff in my mind that I’d like to pass on to Barak if I ever had a chance to get a 15 minute face-to-face with him.
It consists of the following four elements; HIGH Gas prices, Washington Lobbyists,
Politics of Distraction, and infinite corporate greed. Properly presented, these four issue/elements complement Obama’s message.
Please pardon me if I avoid too much detail here as considering the complexity of the discussion, one could actually write a term paper on it….
Barak has to reach more of the working class mainstream, and currently everybody is obsessed with gasoline prices headed upwards of $4 per gallon. However, I don’t think Joe Sixpack really understands the behind the scenes mechanism that brought the American motorist face to face with the current skyrocketing gas prices. Intuitively, he knows the oil companies are behind it, but beyond that it’s a blank.
The simple facts are that the oil companies steadily bought up smaller struggling refineries over the years and as a business strategy either tore them down, or permanently padlocked the facilities to put them out of operation. This had the long term effect of removing independent competition from the gasoline supplier market.
Normally, these moves should have raised anti-trust monopolistic concern in Congress and this is where the oil company’s Washington lobby enters the picture. The lobbyists were highly successful in squashing any Congressional thoughts about calling the oil companies to account for their actions in reducing the number of operational refineries available.
Finally, a series of “Red Herrings” were needed to keep the press and the media distracted so that the refinery reduction program driven by the oil companies would remain out of the public eye. At this point the alliance between the Republican Party and the oil companies proved to be mutually beneficial. As the minority party in the US, the pro-business Republican candidates needed craft a message that did not address issues of immediate concern to the average working man. Flooding the nation’s communication channels with endless drivel about so-called “Hot Button” issues allowed the Republicans to skip talking about the real “bread and butter” issues.
These “Hot Button” issues also became the very “Red Herring” for the press and the media that the oil companies were looking for. Hence, the Politics of Distraction served all three groups (oil companies, lobbyists, and Republican politicians) extremely well, to the point where the Politics of Distraction has now become an accepted form of political strategy.
The current inflationary spiral of gasoline prices is a painful example of the damage to the country that can be caused by powerful, out of control, Washington Lobbies. Tying Barack’s anti-lobby message to the current skyrocketing gasoline prices, might be just the thing to impress Joe Sixpack as to the relevant urgency of Barak Obama campaign message.