"There is no cause to worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue.”
- Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, September, 1929 (The Stock Market Crashed October 29, 1929)
June 13, 2012
By: Linda Case Gibbons
America is in the red. Obama-Green investments are a bust. And now Americans are knee-deep in the Black Market.
Who knew?Not President Obama. This week he told us the private sector was doing just fine. Then he had second thoughts and said it wasn’t fine.
What we really needed, he clarified, was for Republicans to help him create more government jobs -- firemen, policemen, teachers, jobs in the public sector.
Public sector, private sector, shovel-ready, wind, solar, or pond scum. It’s all the same to our president. He doesn’t care what it is as long as he says something. And if it doesn’t fly, he comes back and says he didn’t really mean that…whatever it was he just said.
All this would be amusing if he was a 7-year-old running a lemonade stand, but, of course, he is not.
He is the resentful head of a country whose real unemployment rate is up around 14 percent, where 23 million people are out of work or so disgusted they’ve stopped looking for work and where home foreclosures are at a record high.
So the games began. The left defended his comments as "gaffes,” and the right dubbed him out of touch with the American people.
No matter. Both sides are always focusing in on the wrong thing. In the gotcha’ that passes for journalism and congressional representation nowadays, the last word has to be clever, your position undeclared and the country and its people be damned.
The fact is the air is rarified where Obama resides. And, to be fair, that’s understandable. For instance, most of us could scarcely have any opinion about what goes on in high schools since it’s been a long time since we were part of that world.
What is alarming is that the president has no close-up, personal knowledge of the world in which the rest of us live. And people in that world are hurting.
If Obama wanted to bring himself up to speed on our world, he could have taken a quickie tutorial, he could have tuned into CNBC 60 Minutes last night and seen a gaggle of technically homeless children in Seminole County, Florida who never expected to be homeless or to be living in the family car or bussed back and forth to school from a motel right down the road from Disneyworld.
These kids told in their heartbreaking, childlike way how hungry they were at bedtime because their parents had lost the family home, lost their jobs, had no cash and were having trouble figuring out what to do next.
Food was a big deal in their everyday lives.
Probably not the kind of problems or people one meets in Martha’s Vineyard.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Or if Obama wanted access to our world, he could have surfed Al Gore’s Internet and read the New York Post coverage of a new American get-rich scheme: scavenging for goods to sell on the Black Market.
Sure it would have conjured up pictures of barefoot kids in Third World countries picking their way among the discarded computers and electronic equipment dumped in their country. (That’s not our country, is it?) And sure, the president might find the comparison disquieting given how well our country is doing. It is doing well, isn’t it?
Sickeningly reminiscent of The Great Depression which the president is fond of mentioning, people are now stealing quirky commodities whose resale prices have sickeningly skyrocketed.
Things like used cooking oil stolen from behind restaurants to be sold to recyclers to process and resell. And not just from eateries in New York, but in Missouri and Virginia and not commodities like pork bellies or maize or coffee. Used cooking oil.
The New York Post reports "used cooking oil cost next to nothing four years ago. Now it goes for 39 cents a pound.”
"It’s really crazy out here with this grease,” said Eddie, a truck driver who picks up used oil in Brooklyn. "I went to one of my stops and I actually saw a guy pumping grease out with a vacuum cleaner.”
If oil doesn’t appeal, the New York Post listed the market report on per poundage prices for other "commodities” attracting the Black Market crowd’s notice: cardboard (6 cents a pound), old appliances (10 cents) wrought iron gates (12 cents) and a burdensome, but lucrative commodity, manhole covers at 15 cents a pound.
So when the president stumps one more time, this time in Minnesota to the employees of Honeywell and tells them his proposed tax breaks would help them financially, actually it does appear that he is out of touch, now that you mention it.
"There are some folks here who could use $3,000 a year. If you got $3,000 dollars a year extra, that helps you pay down your credit cards, that helps you go out and buy some things that your family needs – which is good for business.
"Maybe some of you will be replacing some thingamajig for the furnace.”
Or maybe cereal and milk and bread for a family that lives in one motel room because they lost their home and their parents are frantic to feed their kids in your America, Mr. Obama? Nice parents who used to work detailing luxury cars, but not anymore, or parents who used to be employed in the Florida tourist industry.
So is "thingamajig” funny? Yes and no. After all what can you expect from a man who gaffes for a living and believes that cutting funds dedicated to our military and national security will result in our being kept out of any further wars?
Which brings to mind those Third World countries again. And, impressionable as I am, I start to conjure up pictures of the future, of our soldiers throwing rocks at Al Quada on the battlefront as their relatives at home are selling Black Market oil used once upon a time to cook McDonald’s French fries.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Welcome to Obama’s America.
Hold the line, America.