Greens, Obama, and Keystone XL

     In the greatly underrated movie Idiocracy, the protagonist Joe is tasked by the President with “fixing ever’thing!” A vastly underestimated manner of passing the buck, but then again, Joe comes from the past, and is dealing with a future world where stupid is the new normal. These are, of course, people who have forgotten that it is water which makes plants grow, not Gatorade.

     The Green movement sometimes lurches along like the civilization of Idiocracy. They carp about private sector interests and entrepreneurship as nothing but “greedy 1%ers”, even if a great number of those who they would represent as such, in the alternative energy field, are barely scraping along looking for all the help they can get. This sort of mass-meme thinking is in for a serious reality check.

      Because one of the features of Green philosophy is that the government ought to be the ones who “fix ever’thing!” not the people themselves, they have played right into the hands of those they despise the most- the players in the energy field who really ARE the 1%. They have placed their faith in Barack Obama- a man who himself has little credibility as for personal veracity any longer, as the “environmentalist president.” Do they know where Barack Obama actually was on the day last year when thousands of them protested on Capitol Hill against the Keystone XL Pipeline?

     Barack Obama was playing golf in Florida with some of the major investors of that widely scorned and unpopular project. Perhaps Barack Obama gets his best thinking done on a golf course, I do not know. But it’s telling and signal that he should spend more time turning an ear toward those 1%er earth-rapers than he would the population he supposedly represents. Especially at the very critical moment when they seek petition of grievances.

     Then again Greens should not be surprised at Barack Obama’s cynical use of their support to get elected. He used the civil liberties lobby in the very same fashion. He paraded himself about as a “Constitutional scholar” all the while, while once he took office, he embarked on the greatest program of totalitarian secret police spying in history. He wrote into law provisions to arrest or detain Americans without due process and for possibly “infinite” indefinite periods. He performs, as Rev. Cornel West so trenchantly put it, like nothing less than “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”

     Mr. Obama would like to kick the can down the road a far as possible rather than face up to his constituency who elected him in order to hopefully watch him “fix ever’thing!” He has put off making a “decision” about Keystone XL until “sometime this next year.” But there can really be little doubt over which way he is leaning on this. I hope I am wrong, but as I have been watching this man’s behavior over the last five years, I would be remiss if I did not say “I warned ya!” Already, the PM of Canada has spoken out that he is “confident” that the US president will approve this billion dollar slap in the face to Greens.  The Vice President of the US, who himself is on record as opposing it, has mentioned he himself feels he is “in the minority around here” i.e., the White House, on the issue. If Greens cannot see the writing on the wall for themselves, then perhaps they need a Cassandra like me to flash the cue cards in their faces.

     I have no such confidence in Barack Obama, that he would not sign the legislation needed to approve Keystone XL. Why? Well, in his own last State of the Union address, he made some small mention- probably overlooked by many- that he was working to create “new pipelines.” President Obama’s idea of alternate energy is fracking, no doubt, and helping out large players (I should add “’helping” in quotes as a caveat, since we saw how much his “help” did to get the Solyndra company off the ground)  rather than helping small scale entrepreneurs who have great ideas to launch but little venture capital to support them- the very small businesses which if they actually received more respect and support from the overblown beast which is the US government, might be able to put even more people to work, doing work which is environmentally friendly and not, as evidenced so far by the number of large scale pipeline accidents in the US and Canada the past two years, just more of the same earth-rapist mentality.

   But then again this is a president who represents a small minority of 1%ers  and grovels at their feet at every opportunity. His “financial advisors” themselves are key players in the drama which led up to the recession his “economic recovery” has still to find solutions for. His approach is to wait until the noise quiets down about something, and then to ram it right down people’s throats, all the while seemingly protesting that he “had to” do it. Usually “because national security.” This was the manner in which he approved indefinite detention, and this will be the manner in which he approves Keystone XL.

     I for one would be shocked if he does not, but Greens are nothing but naive dreamers if they fool themselves into believing that he absolutely won’t. The odds and past evidence are very, very strongly against it.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/08/president-frack-a-lot/
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-electricity-generating-bicycle-desk-that-would-power-the-world/282692/