STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Obama Announces Billions in Grants for Electric Cars
By admin - August 08, 2009

Venturing back to a region reeling in deep unemployment, President Barack Obama's latest mission in Indiana is to show that the costly stimulus plan he lobbied for is producing tangible help – $2.4 billion in taxpayer grants to create electric cars and tens of thousands of jobs. At a recreational-vehicle plant in northern Indiana, Obama on Wednesday will announce the grants as part of a bid to stabilize American confidence. His stop in Wakarusa, Ind., is part of a concerted economic campaign that also will see Vice President Joe Biden and three Cabinet secretaries holding events in four states. As Congress breaks for the summer, the public message war is on. Obama wants to persuade Americans that his economic agenda is working but also remind them it will take time to produce the numbers that people really want: more jobs. That matters immensely in the region where Obama is headed, a capital of RV manufacturing. The industry has been crushed by the recession. Indiana's Elkhart-Goshen area had an unemployment rate of 16.8 percent in June. That's up 10 percentage points from last year. It's also higher than it was when Obama visited in February, although the jobless rate has at least come down from 17.5 percent in May. – AP

Dominant Social Theme: It begins to come together.

Free-Market Analysis: It is pretty strange to bear witness to the creation of an industry. Those who watch these things unfold from a distance and without close attention might agree that cars powered by electricity are a good thing. Meanwhile, those who analyze such trends could construct a different history. And here it is …

We must begin with the monetary elite itself. For it is the monetary elite that deals with dominant social themes. These are fairly simple on the surface and comprise numerous sociopolitical movements. Among them: overpopulation, environmental destruction, private market greed, etc. You can usually tell a dominant social theme because it is broad-based, simplistic, inaccurate and insists on a government solution to a private problem.

The mothership of all dominant social themes (also known as memes since they passed down from one generation to the next) is that Western societies need the supervision of private central banks. Since central banks are in the business of fixing the price of money this obviously isn't so. Even basic economics tells us that price fixing doesn't work. Central banks in fact are the nexus of recessions, depressions and other forms of economic chaos. How they manage to perpetuate themselves is a testament to the power of the larger, global monetary elite.

How then are they created? What think tank comes up with them and how are they infiltrated into the large body politic? That is perhaps a narrative for another day; suffice it to say they exist. They define the conversation of the mainstream media and insistently organize the large democratic responses of the West.

Back to transportation. From our point of view the dominant social theme being pursued by the Obama administration in the United States has to do with an overarching environmental message. The solution is of course government led and the result is more control. The environmental meme is actually split into pieces: pollution, global warming and peak oil (we are running out of energy).

The Obama administration seems in fairly good sync with the memes being promoted. Because the world is running out of oil and because cars pollute too much and because global warming is a threat, the new American Detroit needs to produce … electric cars. Never mind that the power for electric cars must come from large power plants, including plants run via coal, the end result is comforting and more importantly the solution provides additional control.

Have you looked under the hood these days? Not so easy. What was simple has been made very complex. And soon enough coming to your local car dealership may be cars that virtually drive themselves. The range of automobiles is being reduced – electric cars may have neither the range nor the convenience of gas-powered vehicles – even as the licensing requirements are expanding. The ability of the individual to buy a car and drive it anywhere using low-cost gasoline could gradually become a thing of the past.

Will your electricity jack turn into a computer orifice that insists on downloading when and where you've been during the day as well as what driving patterns indicate where you'll be tomorrow? This would be for the driver's own good, yet another safety element.

After Thoughts

We have dealt with one basic dominant social theme above and shown its ramifications. The result, inevitably, is more control in our humble opinion. But meme after meme can be unraveled in the same way. The real solution to counteracting the promotion of dominant social themes, no matter who produces them, is the free market. A market place with minimal regulations, with a "buyer beware" approach (personal responsibility) and with market-based money (a gold market standard) is preferable to a promotions oriented world.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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