Opinion

Driving Mister Barack

November 12, 2008 

Mickey Z.

As you know, the Empire has selected a new emperor. The Mafia has chosen a new don. The corporation has hired a new CEO. Are you brimming with hope yet? Read on…

According to Reuters, (Nov. 11, 2008), President-Elect Barack Obama has urged President-Select George W. Bush to take “measures to help the ailing (automobile) industry on top of a $25 billion loan packaged approved in September.”

I could easily discuss—yet again—the unspoken reality that America’s version of capitalism relies entirely on socialized costs and privatized profits and all those who righteously decry Big Government are choosing to ignore the massive state subsidies that created and maintain Corporate America and “our way of life.”

But Earth’s problems are far worse than state capitalism wearing a transparent free market mask. The auto industry Mister Barack and his merry band of Democratic comrades so desperately want to bailout and revive is and has been one the primary causes for our planet’s environmental and social degradation.

Does the Chairman of Change know or care that during the last century, an area equal to all the arable land in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania was paved in the U.S.? This area requires maintenance costing over $200 million a day and the surreptitious cost of the car culture totals nearly $500 billion a year in the U.S. alone, much of that going to the sustentation of a military presence in the Persian Gulf.

An Obama aide said Mr. “Yes We Can” has suggested “accelerating implementation” of the current auto industry loan package and “exploring avenues that exist under current law.”

Does Bilkin’ Barry the Baby Boomer ever think about how cars create 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually? With approximately one billion discarded tires littering our increasingly paved landscape, let his loyal Obamatrons meditate upon this: Every tire loses one pound of rubber per year, spewing minute grains of rubber into the stratosphere and then back down to find a new home in our water and/or our lungs. Has anyone told the Pope of Hope about the innumerable eco-systems exterminated in order to make way for highways, off-ramps, parking lots, strip malls, and other auto-centric structures?

I could go on (and on) while BHO begs GWB to identify “someone in charge of the auto issue who would have authority to bring about reforms that would lead to a viable auto industry.”

Here’s the equation: A viable auto industry = a non-viable global eco-system.

Along those lines, there was other news on November 11…but it did not make the Reuters wire. The North American Earth Liberation Front (ELF) Press Office announced: “We have one message for the incoming Obama Administration: act to protect the environment or the ELF will.”

Sounds like change we can believe in…

Mickey Z. is a self-educated writer, personal trainer, martial artist, and vegan who lectures on US foreign policy at MIT in his spare time. He has appeared in martial arts films and was known as the Underground Poet for hanging his poetry in the NYC subway. He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, "CPR for Dummies" and "No Innocent Bystanders". He lives with his wife Michele in New York City. You can contact him here. Visit him on the web at Mickeyz.net.