Getting smart or staying stupid

I've developed a really bad habit. I get up around 5:00 a.m. to watch the last hour of Morning Joke on MSNBC. It's on from 6 to 9 east coast time, which means 3 to 6 here. This bad habit ensures that a) I will not get eight hours of sleep each night, and b) I will be pissed off by about 5:45.

This morning was no exception. I'm pissed. One of the guests was Larry Kudlow, who mostly makes me want to vomit. This morning was a bit amusing, however, in that regular commentator Pat Buchanan, who also usually makes me want to vomit, was actually arguing with him over the immoral multimillion dollar salaries and benefit packages for CEOs. That part was actually refreshing.

What angered me, though, was Kudlow's insistence that we begin drilling immediately off the coasts and in Alaska, as - he claims - it will lower the price of gas immediately. According to Kudlow, once the oil producing companies realize Americans are going to get their own oil, they will release more of their supplies and that will lower the price. Supply and demand.

This is typical supply side Republican economics and politics. Think only of the ideological economic principles you embrace so that American business can reap huge profits, and pander to the people so you can get your guys in office to continue the raping of the middle class.

Kudlow thinks only in terms of dollars, and completely ignores environmental concerns. For decades now we have been watching our climate change and our environment deteriorate. For years politicians have paid lip service to finding renewable sources of energy and weaning this country off of oil. For years they have done nothing.

The technology exists to move us from an oil based economy to an economy that takes advantage of wind, sun, plants and even nuclear based energy. Yet we remain stuck in our dependency on oil, which not only continues to harm our planet, but holds us captive to a destructive and violent foreign policy. Drilling for oil will only give us a false sense of security and waste time we should be spending on implementing long term solutions, environmentally friendly solutions.

We have wasted eight years while two oil men ran the country, started wars for oil, and ignored the looming crisis. McCain is proposing the same policies that these oil men are calling for: more drilling. Why? Not because it would mean we could change our foreign policy - McCain wants more wars in the Middle East. He envisions being there for 50 or 100 years if necessary. No, McCain wants more drilling because it's a good campaign issue. Why is it a good campaign issue? Because people are mad that they have to pay so much for a gallon of gasoline.

During these past eight years, when American auto makers should have been manufacturing more fuel efficient cars, and the people should have been demanding them, the car companies sold expensive gas guzzlers, the Bush administration gave tax breaks for the purchase of large vehicles, and the people bought them to show off. We have all been stupid, but it's time to get smart, and that is not what McCain is proposing. He is proposing something incredibly stupid: retain our dependency on oil, but find the oil here in America.

If we go along with Larry Kudlow, and elect John McCain, we will be signing our planet's death warrant. Even if he only serves four years, we can't afford those years.

This is it boys and girls. We must start changing now. We must switch over to other sources of energy as rapidly as possible. The only candidate promising to do that, the only candidate capable of doing that, is Barack Obama.

Stop them now!

Every day in my house I throw away between one and five catalogs that arrive in my mail. Most of them come unsolicited - actually all of them come unsolicited as I never signed up to receive any of them. A few, however, have been welcome over the years and they continue to come because I have purchased something that I saw on their pages.

For years, though, I have been troubled by the waste that they represent. How many trees must be cut down just to print them? It must be an enormous amount. And now, with each of the companies that publish catalogs also having websites, it has become quite easy to just go on line when you are in the market for something. So catalogs, for me at least, have become unnecessary.

However, companies don't just want to sell things to people who already know what they are looking for. They want to sell to people who are relatively satisfied with what they have, at least until they see that new gadget or special dress or fancy cookware in a catalog. Sears knew this decades ago when they began sending out their Wishbook at Christmas time. Kids looked through it, found toys they had never seen before, and made up their list for Santa.

Today, a catalog is something you might just browse through after work when you look through the rest of your mail. All it takes for the catalog to pay for itself is for one thing in that catalog to catch your eye. Even if you don't order it immediately, your brain is primed to think about it, and eventually to want it. You may pick up the phone and order it in a day or two, or wait until you go into the store and buy it then. Either way, the psychology of the catalog has worked.

To my thinking, the enormous number of catalogs that flow uninvited into our homes, while beneficial to the companies that publish them, have created many problems for our society. One has already been mentioned - the destruction of our forests. Another is enticing people to buy things they don't need, creating clutter and storage problems for us as we run out of room to put the special decor for Christmas that is used only two weeks out of the year, the latest cleaning gadget that doesn't really save us time, the fiftieth pair of shoes that we wear only once, and the toys that our children spread all over the house. Finally, in enticing us to buy so many things we don't need, catalogs deplete our bank accounts and run up our credit card debt.

Finally, there is hope - a way to stop the flow of catalogs to your home, to stop the destruction of the forests, the cluttering of your house, and the enticement to buy things you will only regret later.