That was the Reuters headline late last week. It could well have been the headline in any number of financial news, pundit and oil patch pronouncements. Sadly, it is becoming ever clearer we are living in two distinct economies. The one that is benefiting bountifully by the ballooning price of oil. The other, far less connected, far less able to make its voice heard, far less able to make its influence felt in the halls of government. Lacking the moneyed firepower to hire those well oiled
"K Street" lobbyists, they are seeing their hardships, their concerns swept out of sight as best
the oil patch, its flacks and allies can manage to make them invisible to the national consciousness.
In an exchange of emails emanating from comments to my posting "Gasoline Over $3.00 Gallon, Why? BP Knows. Plus Allen Greenspan Sings in the Energy Choir - 07.12.06" a reader, "Gala", wrote eloquently about how that disenfranchised segment of our citizenry is being impacted. I quote her correspondence:
"You and I are on the opposite ends of the food chain. I'm just a rural consumer, broke, free-floating and powerless (unfortunately that last is about to be quite literal). The only oil man I've actually met is my delivery guy who looks so apologetic I give him hot coffee and cookies and tell him it's not his fault.
If you only had some idea of how much damage this is doing to life as lived in the Walmart crowd. Do you know what it is to live at 55 degrees for months on end? I do. Heating oil... has tripled in 6 years. In 2000 I paid 90 cents a gallon. Yesterday it was 2.62. Why is that?
This may be the real summer before the storm. It's not North Koreans that are going to have to choose between food and warmth. It's Northern New York. I'd like to hear how you felt about this after living the way we have to for even one week.
What I wonder about is if this war costs half a trillion already, and we are being squeezed to such excesses by business that are actually getting tax breaks instead of pulling their fair share (talk about chutzpah) and none of this money is even going to the war, where is this half trillion supposed to come from.
Where did that billion sitting in Lee Raymond's pocket come from?"
One would be hard pressed to say it better. This is a great nation not without its warts and blemishes. But something is going terribly wrong when the distinction between becoming rich and creating wealth is becoming so blurred. That a Lee Raymond and his cohorts should prosper by helping to unleash economic conditions resulting in a diminishment of the quality of life for the Gala's of our land and then to be so famously, shamelessly rewarded.
Here is remuneration completely out of sync with what we had understood was the basis of the American dynamic of wealth creation: the entrepreneurship and personal risk taking that has stoked vast opportunities for so many Americans, leading to the enhancement and quality of American lives. The time has come for all of us to refocus on that distinction. Wealth creation is inherent and core to the American experience. Getting rich is not wrong, but the boundaries as we understand them today is fraught with inherent dangers to our society. Lee Raymond's paycheck places our whole sense of balance at risk.