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To: RetiredNow who wrote (251320)	6/1/2010 5:59:22 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Mr. President, take command edition.cnn.com By David Gergen, CNN Senior Political Analyst June 1, 2010 -- Updated 1121 GMT (1921 HKT) Editor's Note: David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has served as an adviser to four U.S. presidents. He is a professor of public service and the director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. (CNN) -- Enough is enough! After the latest failure by BP to plug the gaping hole, it is time for President Obama to take full command of this growing national catastrophe. Immediately! The president in his press conference this past Thursday assured the nation that he and his administration were already in charge and he has manfully taken personal responsibility -- "the buck stops here," he said, echoing Harry Truman. Well, it may be true that BP has been acting all along under the oversight of the federal government, but that supervision has been loose and ineffective. To the world, it has been apparent that the government has been riding shotgun and BP has been at the wheel. It's time for the White House to get in the driver's seat and get us to safety -- fast. First off, who can now trust BP to do the job right? From the beginning, it has appeared to be more interested in shoring up its stock price than in playing straight and solving the problem. It took reckless short cuts in opening up the rig, had no serious plan in place for a disaster, low-balled early estimates of the spill, has high-balled its chances of stopping the leak and has kept both the government and the public too much in the dark. And its efforts on shore are increasingly pathetic -- can it really have failed to protect the safety of beach workers and have stage managed the clean-up when Obama was there, as reported? It was a mistake to leave our fate in the hands of this company as long as we have. Second, even if BP were reliable, the problem has clearly become too big for it to handle, as Colin Powell is now arguing on television. We have been told for days that the top kill procedure was BP's best hope for stopping the leak and if that failed, we would likely have to wait until BP drilled new wells which might be as late as August. We can't wait that long. BP is especially not up to the task of protecting our precious shorelines and cleaning up the beaches. For that, we need the organizational strength of the U.S. military. Third, this catastrophe is increasingly threatening the nation's welfare. With a potentially dangerous storm season just around the corner, a continuing gush of oil will not only pose huge, long-term damage to the Gulf region but could easily wash the oil around the tip of Florida and up the East Coast. The loss to livelihoods, the economy and to ways of life would be immeasurable. It would be worse than Katrina and Exxon Valdez put together. Unless we solve this soon, this spill could do to off-shore drilling what Three Mile Island did to nuclear power -- darn near kill it. Obama is right that it is a wake-up call to end our addiction to oil, but we need some forms of off-shore oil as a bridge to that future. Finally, Obama's leadership is increasingly at stake in this emergency. I thought Peggy Noonan was premature in arguing in the Wall Street Journal this weekend that the spill has already broken his presidency, but her column certainly gave pause. The cameras down at the bottom of the sea give us vivid reminders that this oil is spewing forth day after day after day -- almost like the daily television reminders we had of how long our hostages were held in Teheran while Jimmy Carter sat helplessly in the White House, the authority leaking out of his presidency. What can the White House do? For starters: -- Set up a daily command center in Washington where a presidentially appointed leader runs the show, calls the shots, coordinates the overall effort, briefs the president and briefs the country -- Have two deputies, one to direct the leak-stoppage and the other to direct the clean-up. Ex-CEOs and generals would be excellent candidates -- Summon all the major oil and drilling companies to the White House for emergency efforts to get the hole plugged -- Get BP out of the picture for clean-up; just send it the bill. If it is still needed for hole-plugging, okay, but ensure that it answers every day to directions from the government. If BP needs new internal leadership, figure out how to get that done -- Employ the U.S. military for organizational coordination and where needed, for anything else such as clean-up -- Make more aggressive efforts to tap the best minds in the world for help -- Provide the country with the kind of daily briefings that the military has mastered for wartime -- bring in people who are smart, straight and tough -- Ensure that economic assistance is provided to families, small businesses and communities that need it with dispatch and generosity -- Call off the finger pointing until we get out of this mess -- And finally, very importantly, exercise the powers of leadership every day from the Oval Office The whole country now has a keen interest in the White House now taking full command. Mr. President, it's your move. The nation cannot afford to wait that long -- the government needs to summon all the big oil and drilling companies to the White House on an emergency basis and seek faster answers. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Gergen.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (251320)	6/1/2010 6:16:13 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Respond to of 306849

north dakota has a state bank that issues interest free credit for state projects. their economy is doing pretty well right now. this is another good resource. webofdebt.com

To: RetiredNow who wrote (251320)	6/1/2010 6:30:58 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

mind, read this link to the end... webofdebt.com CA will go into bankruptcy paying over 7% compound interest instead of fund a state bank and lever its $71 billion to use as capital for a state bank. instead of paying 7% interest, the state could earn 7% interest on this money - the difference in the two policies is paid for by the tax payers. in short, the banks bribe government in order to loot tax payers.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (251320)	6/1/2010 11:41:39 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 306849

The Oil Plume _______________________________________________________________ By DAVID BROOKS Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times May 31, 2010 The failure of the top-kill technique in the Gulf of Mexico represents an interesting turning point on the Obama presidency. It symbolizes the end of the period of lightning advance and the beginning of the period of nasty stasis. President Obama swept into office having aroused the messianic hopes of his supporters. For the past 16 months he has been on nearly permanent offense, instigating action with the stimulus bill, Afghan policy, health care reform and the nearly complete financial reform. Whether you approve or not, this has been an era of bold movement. But now the troops are exhausted, the country is anxious, the money is spent and the Democratic majorities are teetering. The remaining pieces of legislation, on immigration and energy, are going nowhere. (The decision to do health care before energy is now looking extremely unfortunate.) Meanwhile, the biggest problems are intractable. There’s no sign we will be successful in preventing a nuclear Iran. Especially after Monday’s events, there’s no chance of creating a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unemployment will not be coming down soon. The long-term fiscal crisis won’t be addressed soon either. In other words, if the theme of the past 16 months was large change, the theme of the next period will be gridlock and government’s apparent impotence in the face of growing problems. And, at this particular moment, we are confronted by the picture of an uncontrolled gusher of oil spewing destruction into the gulf. This image could be with us for another few months, searing into the national consciousness and becoming the defining image of 2010. Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself. The plume taps into a series of deep anxieties. First, it taps into the anxiety that the people running our major institutions are just not that competent. Second, it feeds into the anxiety that there has been an unhappy marriage between corporations and government officials, which has had the effect of corrupting both. Most important, the plume exposes the country’s core confusion about the role of government. When this country was born, the founders laid down strict roles for the federal government and the president. But over the years, the roles of government and the presidency have expanded. As a matter of conviction, the country is deeply uncomfortable with these expansions. Operationally, on the other hand, the country has become accustomed to the new programs and to the new presidential role. In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf. On the other hand, they demand that the president “take control.” They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage. They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn’t control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn’t want cuts, wants change and doesn’t want change. At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government. If this disaster teaches anything, it is that we are a venturesome, entrepreneurial society. We rely on corporations like BP to bring us energy. At the same time, it is clear that even well-meaning corporations sometimes take shortcuts when it comes to controlling pollution and protecting worker safety. So we want government to regulate business. We want regulation to be strong enough to reduce risk but not so strong as to stifle innovation. We want regulators to work cooperatively but not be captured by those they monitor. We have known, for a long time, that regulation is about balance. The proper regulatory regime has to be set case by case and year by year. We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins.