Trump and “Face the Press”: Let’s turn the lights on one of the fairy tales that danced around unnoticed in the dark and see what we have.
(Rather than give the punctuation police conniption fits, I urge you to employ your imagination and apply the punctuation “The Donald” would have used in a tweet. Visualize capitalization, sarcastic quote marks and exclamation points around the following words “we” and “our.” It would assist me greatly in making my point in the proper context. Thanks.)
Trump tells us that we could’ve made “lots of money” if Biden hadn’t opened up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when he did. (Biden’s action on that front was all about preventing gasoline prices from soaring even higher than what we had planned for). We need to go bonkers drilling for more domestic oil. We shouldn’t have to depend on other countries’ production for our needs.
Translated: Don’t rock the boat with alternate energy when our super national corporations need to make more profits by getting their raw product free from our land, rather than paying for it somewhere else. To make this appear as a solid, fact-filled process of logic, one must tack on a slogan or two: “We own this country,” and “We’re taking it back.” There you go — feel better now?
By the way: More oil comes from the United States than any other country in the world and it’s been that way for quite some time. Russia, Canada, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia all take a back seat.
As President Reagan once said, “Facts are stupid things,” and I hate to say it, but:
Fossil fuel production is not a nationalized, communist, socialist endeavor in the United States. The “we” constantly referred to in this subject does not refer to the American people or the government. It refers to businessmen around the world who just last year received more than $7 trillion dollars of government money just to help them conduct business.
In the United States, under new Trump legislation, Chevron paid absolutely no taxes on $4.5 billion in profit while receiving a tax “rebate” of $181 million. I guess that last bit was just something the government came up with to help Chevron’s millionaires get over the shock of paying no taxes.
The irony is obvious and painful: We constantly broadcast the illusion that our fossil fuel industry is nationalized, pretending that somehow we are all involved in their machinations other than just being smashed in the gears. In contrast, we condemn nationalization of this industry in countries where that is the reality. Venezuela comes to mind. You know, that country that had the nerve to say that they, and not “we,” own their oil? Suddenly they’re our enemy.
This type of misconception and distortion is also evident when Trump makes the claim that putting an import tax on China’s products resulted in China paying us billions of dollars. Anyone want to point out who actually pays an import tax?
Dennis Shain
Centralia
