PAYING FOR CLEAN ENERGY--AND NEW ORLEANS

It used to be that rich people gave fat sums of money to presidents and politicians to buy the kind of government they wanted. Barack Obama has changed all that. Now he asks little, otherwise insignificant people like me to give him money to buy the kind of government we want. And he obviously has a whole staff of people hired to do this.

For example: This morning I received an e-mail from Mitch Stewart, seemingly the chief confidence man. Today’s subject is “Getting to a Clean Energy Future.” I opened it because of the topic. As a New Orleanian, I am very seriously concerned about our energy future; but more of that later.

Mr. Stewart’s plan this morning was that I add my name to a letter asking the U. S. Senate to vote for Clean Energy legislation. So I did, electronically. But in order to complete this transaction, I was required to choose an amount—between $5.00 and $34,495.00—and submit my credit card information.

I had no intention of paying even $5.00 to try to influence a vote in the Senate. My taxes already pay Senators outrageously and give them health care nobody else in America has and a pension that pays their salaries for life.

But I couldn’t vote unless I paid. I tried giving them a wrong credit card number—but somehow they already had my credit card information, and rejected my wrong number! Hmmmn. What is the president’s chief con man doing with my credit card information?

The Obama “open government” wheeze is just that: another con game. Through Mitch Stewart and others on his team, Mr. Obama gets to talk to me by e-mail any time he wants to. But there is never—never—an opportunity for me to reply.

He tells me he wants me to support his health care plan. I want to say, yes, I will—but first I want him to agree to a much bigger health care plan, by closing his concentration camp at Guantanamo and ending his two brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I am not allowed to say that.

He asks me regularly to support something or another, but he never mentions Guantanamo or his wars. And I am supposed to support him? Nonsense.

Mr. Obama is full of words about the BP oil spill catastrophe. Words. George Bush only flew over New Orleans once after Katrina; Obama has flown over four times, and twice he has landed. Of course, those four fly-overs cost us a total of nearly $20,000,000.00 –which could much more usefully been spent on relief for the shrimp fishermen and their families whose livelihood has been wiped out by this disaster. Obama’s fly-overs are a very expensive, insensitive, useless publicity stunt.

Mr. Obama is intelligent. Why didn’t he start building a barricade in front of wetlands and wildlife refuges—and even beaches—on the first day? The country is full of big earth-moving rigs, used by construction companies to build highways, used by Colin Powell’s army to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers—to bury them alive in the sand. And why haven’t we been siphoning spilled oil out of the Gulf for six weeks now? He should have ordered that on the second day after the disaster struck.

Since Mr. Obama assumed office, he has mocked himself, his promises, and his promise. We expected a great deal of him, because he promised a great deal. All the world saw a promising future in him. And he has betrayed us.

The constant solicitation scheme is offensive. So are the chatty one-way communications he sends out as electronic versions of the infamous “rallies” of earlier times. We can’t talk back. We can’t ask him about the promises he has broken, about his new war hatching in Pakistan.

We can sign our names to letters of support for him. And we can pay him to let us do this. That’s all.

And that’s democracy.

Bert Hornback