Late yesterday evening I was conversing via Twitter with a new friend of mine named TheWebPixie, and I want to share the following comments I posted on her PixiePolitics blog. After sleeping on it, I’m convinced that the idea may have merit:
In my opinion, the People of the United States need to unite and start taking back ownership of their assets, INCLUDING our Government. At present, the U.S. Government is not in a position to be running anything — they’ve proved their incompetence over the past several years. Example: their gross mismanagement is costing us $12 billion dollars per month in Iraq, [as well as deterioration of Social Security, banking oversight, and numerous other government-run failures].
It may seem far-fetched, but if there was a way for citizens to have an individual, vested stake in ownership of utilities, petroleum, and commodities, maybe we would have better control over [the retail price of] essential goods.
I don’t know how to get it done, but it takes entrepreneurs like T. Boone Pickens to lead us in the right direction.
Some essential products need to be better regulated, especially when we are so vulnerable to abusive profiteering under the guise of “free market capitalism”.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, but I hope and pray that they at least think about what’s happening to America. Maybe we’ll [come together] do something about it.
Independently.
Peter Santilli
Implementation of such an idea would be monumental. Maybe we could solicit the government’s help in financing and regulation. A committee of business people, entrepreneurs, legal experts, and investors could guide us towards building this “non-profit entity” whose sole purpose is to allow the American people to compete against the profit-raking mentality of Corporations.
If politicians supporting “drill here, drill now” want to represent the people’s interests, then maybe they should formulate such a proposal to nationalize the oil and gasoline industry on behalf of the People’s interests. Of course, simply to hold us over until we become 100% independent of foreign oil.
Here’s the thing – even if utilities are publically owned (which some already are) with each person owning a piece, they will still operate in our FREE MARKET system. Your idea is completely unreasonable unless you think we should be moving towards socialism?
However, we have absolutely no need to drill offshore. It’s a ploy to drive people who hate high gas prices into voting for McCain and other republicans. The truth is that offshore drilling may never, ever help with gas prices OR our dependence on foreign oil. Our “dependence” on foreign oil makes this country billions of dollars and it would be a seriously cold day before any republicans OR democrats did anything to ween us away from that.
“…the People of the United States need to unite and start taking back ownership of their assets, INCLUDING our Government.”
This is particularly true for those of us who believe that our government is “of the peoople, by the people, and for the people.”
Presuming we U.S. citizens do take back ownership of their own assets, how do you suggest that ownership be distributed? I am not being sarcastic or cynical. I am genuinely curious!
Some utiilies are user-owned, such as the Rural Electric Cooperatives. This system seems to work quite well, except for the for-profit and investor-owned utilies. The investor-owned utilites do much to lobby against the electric-coops, with elected official and their own employees. Much of their so-called facts really have no basis in fact. Their efforts have more to do with protecting their ability to enrich their shareholders than to increase efficiency or lower utility rates.
I look forward to seeing more conversation on this topic, Peter! I hope this comment section will provide a platform for others to express their views.
I don’t have all the answers here, but are we saying we should repurpose the assets in the US in order to drill more, build more refineries, increasing the supply and thus driving down the global price?
It’s an interesting idea, this notion of nationalizing oil reserves.
@theex until we can break the dependence on foreign oil, nationalizing the oil we do have has some intriguing possibilities. Is oil a utility, like electricity and water? If so, does it really belong in the public domain?
I’m mixed about it. There are implications I’m not comfortable with, like the idea of entrusting the power associated with oil control to the government.
Need to give this more thought.