The Economic Crisis is just a Symptom of the Energy Crisis

Hi all,
some of you may know that there is a new feature to the Pickens Site. We now have a vblog for TB Pickens himself. This will be a daily video message to use letting us know what is on his mind. The latest entry, I watched this morning, discussed the economic crisis and how it is connected to oil prices. Now at first blush I think that some may scratch there head and say, but what about the mortgage crisis. What about the banks risky lending practices?

Yes, what about those? These are a factor, obviously, however there is a fundamental that does not revel itself at first look. It is that energy is the basis for our entire economy. You can't really find a single aspect of our national economy that is not directly affected by the cost of oil. I would point out to you that it is not a coincidence that these financial institutions which were teetering on the edge are suddenly tipping a mere few months after gas prices topped 4.00 a gallon.

Think about this for a moment. We as middle class, upper and lower middle class, have been dependent on cars to move around ourselves, our food, all of the goods that we consume. Our wages have been stagnate for over a decade while prices have been creeping up ever so slightly. Many of us have turned to credit over the years to fill that gap since wages were not. Then out of the blue, oil sky rockets out of control. This has caused us to almost double the amount we spend to get back and forth to work. Food prices takes off. Everything goes up. So we are suddenly hammered from every direction that we can look. For those who took chances in the real estate market, they got nailed. Ballooning mortgages at the same time that gas prices, food prices and everything else takes off. Their financial world ended.

Now do not get me wrong. I believe that this crises that exists is real. And the practices of many banks and sub prime lending companies have created the basic problem here. What I am saying is that skyrocketing oil prices made a bad thing worse. In fact it could be argued that it took it to the crises level. With the oil prices jumping like they did, even people who were not risk takers suddenly were in trouble. People, a lot of good responsible people who were on the edge have suddenly been bought low due to the energy policy of the past 50 years. We have all felt the pinch these past 6 months. It is only getting worse as DOW Chemical raises the cost of all of their chemicals by 100% in the past 6 months, it is going to get a lot worse, we just don't know it yet.

Mr. Pickens is correct in this, the root of this crisis is really the energy policy. We need to get our congressmen and women on board. They need to sign on to the Pickens plan. They need to support HR 2809, the New Apollo Energy Act. They dove tail together perfectly. Pickens and his plan calls for help developing the grid to handle new energy generation. This is in the New Apollo Energy Act. The Apollo act calls for massive investment into new power generation, Pickens is tight on board leading the charge. We need to call our congress people and tell them to sign on with Pickens and get behind and add their support to the Apollo act. This will be a one two punch knock the energy policy of the country into a more sustainable energy future.

If we make these new bold steps we will start moving into a better economic future. A lot will happen. We will become less susceptible to oil market swings. We will isolate ourselves form the impending issue of peak oil. But more importantly, and this is very important, there are great things to be done to improve our infrastructure. We must modernize our grid, our energy generation systems. Doing this will create tens of thousands if not millions of good jobs. manufacturing jobs, construction jobs. We can use this as an opportunity to pull the economy out of the potential doldrums we are heading into. Call now, tell them to sign the Pickens plan and to sponsor HR 2809. Doing this more then bailing out Wall Street bad practices is really the way to address the economic crisis we are on the edge of. Call now. Tell them they need to really examine the bail out and more importantly, they MUST sign on to the Pickens Plan. they must support HR 2809.