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This will probably be my last “major” posting before the American elections.  Although I know the social issues are what Christians are “supposed” to focus on, I’m taking a different tack and look at an economic one, one which I’m all too familiar with and which has shoved itself back into people’s consciousness–the oil industry.

Back in 1980, my brother and I went to London for an offshore oil show.  Part of our trip was to head out to Wembley (near the old football stadium) to visit our largest customer’s UK office.  British/European car buffs that we were, the car park was what we first wanted to see.  (I’ll get to that later.)

Since the main function of the Wembley office was engineering, and ours was equipment, the fit wasn’t the best.  But we managed to spend some time with a senior official who gave us an overview of offshore oil development in Europe, which was well underway by the early 1980’s.

Up to that point Europe was very short of internal oil and gas production; most of it came from the Middle East (and we all know how much fun that is.)  The discovery of North Sea oil and gas revolutionised the whole energy picture for the continent, and the countries that had it either onshore or offshore (UK, Norway, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands) weren’t going to miss the opportunity.  However, as was explained to us, all of the countries realised that it was a limited resource.  So they organised the permitting and pace of development so that the benefits of the revenue stream would be stretched out to the maximum benefit of the country (and that included not overwhelming the country’s economy with oil money, especially important for the Norewgians.)

True to form, all of the countries involved (and again especially the Norwegians) put into place an environmental and safety regime to insure that the development would be suitable for all forms of life.  This drove many Americans, used to the free form environment of the Gulf of Mexico, crazy.  But the key thing is, it was done.  The oil and gas was developed and the countries benefited.  As a side benefit they advanced the technology of offshore oil development, which has spilled over into other endeavours.

Today, it’s fair to say that the Democrats, on the whole, would like to see a more European style of economy come to these shores.  For them this involves putting into place the social net they see in Europe (universal health care, a robust dole for the unemployed, widespread trade unions, etc.)  and the high, progressive taxes to go with them.  What’s generally missing from their programme is the economic development facilitation, and no where is their animus against this more evident than with offshore oil development.  The Republicans forced them, kicking and screaming, into letting the moratorium on this on both left and right coasts to expire.  It’s a given that, under an Obama presidency and a Democrat controlled Congress, that would be reimposed, and our dependence on foreign oil imports stretched out.

Fuelling this animus is a luddite, romantic vision of a country, once depopulated, being returned to its pristine state.  Such a vision drives the environmental movement, and drove much of the 1960’s radical revolt, another reason why people such as William Ayers matter.  Under such a regime we would have the worst of both worlds: a socialistic economy without the drive for the wealth creating development it needs to live on.  Even the Soviet Union was committed to industrial development.

It would be nice for a more reasoned approach to prevail, but emotionalism has always driven this country’s life.  In the meanwhile what I’ve just explained is one reason why I’ve never voted for a Democrat for President and don’t intend to start now.

And the car park?  Because of British tax laws, it was advantageous for employers to furnish company cars to just about everyone.  So that was done on a very rank-driven basis.  UK Ford had won the biggest contract, so out at the edge, near the street, were the little Escorts and Fiestas.  Approaching the main entrance to the building (which was in the back) were the larger Cortinas and Granadas.  Right in front of that entrance was the car park attendant, shining up the Managing Director’s XJ series Jaguar, parked so that same Director wouldn’t get wet in the frequent British rain.

Having worked for a company (Texas Instruments) where there weren’t any reserved spaces, let alone company cars like this, it was an eye opener.  But when tax-driven decisions dominate, strange and inegalitarian things like this happen.  That’s someting to think about when voting for those who claim to spread the wealth around.

It’s getting rough out there, even for a leftist like Cindy Sheehan:

Just 5 days before the election, at 3a.m. on October 30th, all of the front windows of the Cindy Sheehan for Congress campaign offices were shattered. Although staffers had been in the office less than an hour earlier, no one was in the building at the time of the incident. No one was hurt and there were no witnesses. Cindy Sheehan is a candidate for Congress in California’s 8th Congressional District race against incumbent Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

“It seems to have been a calculated intimidation tactic,” said Tiffany Burns, the Cindy for Congress campaign manager. “One of our computers was stolen, but no other property was taken from our offices and no surrounding buildings were targeted. Clearly they wanted to both frighten us and to gather information.” Total damage to the campaign office is currently estimated at more than $5,000.

Frankly, I’m not much of a fan of Cindy Sheehan.  But, as we say these days, she is what she is–an real anti-war activist in the tradition of those who marched, demonstrated and even terrorised (like William Ayers) in protest of the Vietnam War.

But she’s finding out that what Leon Trotsky found out the hard way: you can consign your right-wing opponents to the asheap of history (as he did in the wake of the Russian Revolution) and still find yourself on the wrong side of the revolution.  Which makes me wonder: how many of Barack Obama’s fervent supporters are going to end up in the same boat?  As Michael Barone calls it, it’s thugocracy, and it isn’t fun.

I’m not sure why the Australian Christian Lobby is so gleeful over their government’s proposal to implement mandatory internet censorship:

The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) today welcomed Government moves towards a two-tiered Internet filtering system which would include mandatory blocking of illegal material.

ACL Managing Director Jim Wallace said it is vital that better Internet safeguards are put in place to protect children and the community from the increasingly abusive and degrading material too easily available over the Internet from both legal and illegal sources.

“Obviously the Internet industry is going to continue to fight this important initiative but the interests of children must be placed first.

“The need to prevent access to illegal hard-core material and child pornography must be placed above the industry’s desire for unfettered access.”

More details on this proposal are here.

The ACL, like their counterparts in the U.S., aren’t thinking this through.  And they should: two Christian ministers in Australia just went through a legal ordeal where they were accused of hate crimes by Muslims upset that they pointed out what the Qur’an actually says.

I don’t like the garbage that’s on the Net these days either.  But it’s just as easy to block Christian material as it it pornography (easier, perhaps, because a lot of it is in text.)  And that’s one of the long-term objectives of hate crime legislation, on both sides of the Pacific.

The ACL needs to wake up and realise that they’re–and we–are probably next to be censored.

Even a liberal virtual rag like the IHT admits this is so:

The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that the United States is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.

Most American parents never see these damning international comparisons, which are based on census figures and labor force statistics. Instead, parents who want to know how their schools are doing in terms of vital statistics like graduation rates must rely on phony calculations cooked up by state governments that are determined to hide the truth for as long as possible.

Evidently my cautious optimism during the time I was on a search committee for a school superintendent was misplaced.

Blaming students and parents for this isn’t the answer.  Personally, I’d advise any student college bound and with sense (and those don’t always go together) to either a) get early admission and exit high school before the senior year, or b) drop out, get a GED, then get admission to a college.  The latter might not get you into the Ivy League, but perhaps you can emigrate and have an really interesting life.

The core of the problem is that you have a collusion of school administrators and the teachers’ trade union whose main goal is to preserve their turf.  And I honestly don’t see either party (especially the Democrats, who receive so much support from the trade union) taking on this combination, something I discussed last summer in Obama Can’t Get Past Bonjour.

As if to underscore a point no one seems to get, from a fascinating article about how interfaith efforts to secure religious freedoms have gotten lost in the journalistic shuffle:

“What we found out was that human rights are part of one package,” said Hertzke. “If you pull out the pin of religious freedom, it’s hard to support freedom of speech, freedom of association and other crucial human rights. Religious freedom is a rich and strategic human right.”

Both the journalists and some in the Evangelical community believe that the goal of the effort is to spread the imposition of certain ways of life on others.  This shared assumption is what really complicates our current political and social dynamic.  Evidently it even put strains on the interfaith coalitions formed to make campaigns for religious freedom a reality:

This coalition was “made up of groups that usually fought like cats and dogs on other issues, but would join together to work for religious freedom,” said Hertzke, speaking at the University of California, Berkeley.

These leaders would work on religious-liberty issues over morning coffee and bagels, before returning to their offices where they usually found themselves in total opposition to one another on abortion, gay rights, public education and a host of other church-state issues. Nevertheless, their coordinated labors on foreign policy projects “produced trust and relationships that had never existed before,” he said.

The question is whether this coalition’s ties that bind can survive tensions created by the current White House race and renewed conflicts over religious and cultural issues in America.

“The kinds of energies generated in these kinds of social movements are hard to sustain,” said Hertzke. “There was always the concern that fighting over the familiar social issues would siphon away some of the energy that held this remarkable coalition together for a decade. …

“The fear is that if people feel really threatened on the issues here at home that matter to them the most — like abortion — then they will not be able to invest time and resources in these human-rights issues around the world.”

And Bloodworth-Thomason’s remarks come not a moment too soon either:

The cable news channel is “completely out of control,” said writer-producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat.

She added that she would prefer a lunch date with right-leaning Fox News star Sean Hannity over left-leaning MSNBC star Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann was criticized by many who attended Monday’s luncheon sponsored by the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The event was dubbed “Hollywood, America and Election ’08.”

Bloodworth-Thomason and others seemed especially critical of the way MSNBC — and other media — has attacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while demeaning her supporters.

“We should stop the demonizing,” she said, adding that Democrats have been worse than Republicans as far as personal attacks on candidates are concerned. “It diminishes us,” she said of her fellow Democrats. She stressed, though, that its Palin’s small-town American roots she wishes to defend and not her politics or policies.

Bloodworth-Thomason even suggested a defense of Palin and her supporters should be written into TV programming, just as she went out of her way to portray Southern women as smart in her hit TV show “Designing Women.”

You may remember that Harry and Linda Thomason are die-in-the-wool Clintonistas who were very prominent in that administration.  You know it’s bad when she’d rather have a lunch date with Sean Hannity!

But the whole business of demonising Sarah Palin goes to the heart of what this election is all about.  We’ve been building up to this for a long time, but the blunt truth of the matter is that Sarah Palin is a major threat to the élites in our society just by being who she is.

What we are being presented with by the left is simple: only a few people, who have gone to the right schools, live in the right places and associate with the right people are fit to govern the country. The rest of us are simply too stupid.  I’ve beat on this issue before on both a political and personal level before, and the sad part is that too many on the right agree with them (for example, Peggy Noonan and her attacks on Sarah Palin.)

What Linda Bloodworth-Thomason may not realise is that Palin’s “small-town American roots”–and her sticking to them in her life–are the core issue.  What we have is two groups of people who cannot survive if the other is in charge.  Or, as one Russian ambassador put it about the conflicts in his own time, “No treaties are possible between them.  The existence of one means the death of the other.”  That explains much of the viciousness we see in this election cycle.

Irrespective of whether you think that Sarah Palin is the ideal standard bearer for her values and those like her, the triumph of the élite idea of success is the end of the American social dynamic as we have known it.  And that leads to the next question: will this new “Plan B” work?  I doubt it.