Price Per Gallon versus Your 'Price' Per Vote? 100 Years of OCADD?

There is a reason we do not see too many two dollar bills in this country, though the explanation is not well known and may not be what you think. The problem that caused this strange quirk of currency was so severe that it affected Canada, too. Of course, Canadians have since gone a long way to solving the problems of dollar bills wearing out so fast, and even overcame the most of the phobia about the $2.00 monetary unit. They successfully introduced a $1.00 coin they now affectionately call a “loonie.” The name was derogatory at first, implying that it was “crazy” to attempt to eliminate the paper version of the single dollar bill, but owes its name to the image of the bird pictured on the reverse of the coin. Two dollar bills, while not strictly rare in Canada, have now been replaced with another durable coin which is widely known as a “two-nie” (actually usually spelled “toonie”, being twice the value of a loonie, that seems logical, though I would have preferred the irony of calling it a “dub-loonie” punning on the pirate coinage of old).

Coins far outlive paper money, thus saving the taxpayers substantial annual printing costs. Theoretically at least, we could also have been saving some of those costs by using two dollar denominations of the paper stuff. The fact that we (and the Canadians) didn’t do so was a matter of distaste and public political scandal.

Long ago, long before many of the protective regulations that attempt to assure fair and honest elections, the party political machines, and especially some wealthy politicians, made it a fairly common practice to offer direct bribes to voters for their votes on Election Day. Agents of the political candidates would circulate among the bars and taverns, as well as simply standing outside the polls, handing out money in exchange for the promise of a vote for their favored candidate. As you have probably guessed by now the price offered for most votes was two dollars, reputedly at least, frequently paid in freshly minted two dollar bills.

The problem really arose in the days and weeks following Election Day. Anyone seen to be spending one or more two dollar bills was assumed to have sold their vote, or certainly fell under suspicion of the apparent connection. Of course the explanation that one had received the money in legitimate payment on another matter held little sway. There were plenty of denizens of the bars and disreputable establishments who cared a lot less about the resulting stigma than what the, in those days, fairly substantial sum would buy. Remember, we are speaking of days in our history when a dollar might be a good, or at least a modest day’s wages. Even those of the gentler gender who were not permitted to vote themselves were often looked down upon, not so much for selling their birthright but rather that by spending a two dollar bill they might be seen as having fallen upon hard economic times as indicated by the fact that their spouse would sell their political clout so cheaply. Or worse yet, in the era of the waves of temperance that swept the country, that your husband may have become a drunkard. Women played no small role in what amounted to this boycott of two dollar bills.

No sense being poor and looking poor too,” was the phrase my father learned from his mother back close to that era (though as the son of a tailor, his mother’s use of this phrase had nothing to do with politics). The net result of the two dollar vote buying scandal was that nearly no “respectable” woman would be seen spending currency of that denomination anywhere, or in any season, election or not. The bills fell into disuse. But let us be clear on one fact. At the time, “buying” votes was not against the law, at least not when the practice started in America, and it was happening quite openly, right at the polls.

You might think that if there is anything we don’t need in Washington it would be more gas in Congress. Yet that seems to be exactly what we are getting. And believe it or not, I am not changing the subject by saying so.

I know that I said, just a few weeks ago, that conspiracy theories blaming the government were doomed to be disproved in almost every case, because such a proposition assumes a basic level of competence of which the government simply is not capable. I said too, however, as you may recall, that it does not follow that big corporations are incapable of vast and powerful manipulations, whether that might be of the economy, the people or, of course, also foreign states.

As everyone knows laws are made to be broken. What? Did he just say that? Yes, because if no one committed robbery or murder there would be no practical reason to have laws against those acts that threaten to damage society as a whole or the lives and well being of its members.

Not very long ago, Congress created laws against the rather common practice of bribing foreign officials in order for American corporations to obtain lucrative contracts in their countries. Fortunately, though it is nice to think that we maintain such high moral standards, since most other countries place no such handcuffs on their corporations, most multinationals are capable of finding workarounds and loopholes large enough to allow some of the world’s larges copper mines, hydro-electric dams and complex engineering project to fit through them. That is not to say that I do not wish to see an end to such corrupt practices, but only that when such practices are the only way to do business on a level playing field within those regimes, promising to perform only while hopping up and down on one foot while simultaneously singing nursery rhymes and following US laws is no advantage to US-based companies.

On the other hand, having gained such skills on foreign soil, I have to wonder if we may be observing a similar political chess move with respect to domestic politics and the upcoming National Election. We seem to all suffer from short attention span problems. Maybe it is not “attention deficit” so much as “education deficit” in America. We don’t seem to be able to remember what happened last month, much less learn from the perspective of history how the world works.

Please do not misconstrue my meaning. I have nothing against extremely wealth individuals taking leadership roles in government. Indeed such business acumen would, one might think, be a tremendous attribute to have in running a country. I always thought Ross Perot was a little far “out there” on some of his ideas, but I had no doubt that he would push for reforms of increased efficiency in government. On the other hand, we seem to have elected George Bush and the Bush clan of oil-dipped, gasoline soaked business men that flavors all their decisions. Yes, I know that Bush said we are “addicted to oil” and that we need to get off the mainlining habit. But I also keep seeing signs in classrooms that say, “No matter what you say, your actions speak for you.”

The “signs” I see on the national stage, however, seem considerably more ominous. The “oil patch” has known for a very long time about the drilling programs in the Gulf of Mexico that Shell and Chevron have been working on. The recent announcement of a huge discovery by Chevron comes remarkably close to election time. I don’t believe I have heard an actual announcement from Shell (I may just have missed it) but it was also widely reported at the time of the Chevron announcement that a similar bulletin from Shell was expected in the coming weeks. Anyone want to place bets on which week late in October or early November that will happen?

In light of world demand, although substantial, this new Chevron discovery is a tiny percentage of world reserves, and does little in the long run to relieve dependence on foreign sources of energy. What it has helped to do is to relieve the panic pressure on the oil futures market, and by extension on the spot price of oil. We have seen record highs just last month, but the drop has been sharp and fast.

It may not be an example of Newton’s third law, but while gasoline prices at the pump have been falling the one thing that has been rising in recent weeks is the George Bush approval ratings in the opinion polls. Does it really sound like coincidence that a sudden improvement of almost a dollar a gallon (yes, it is down from well over $3.00 in my neighborhood two months ago to as low as $2.23 a gallon today) comes at the same time as Bush’s gains in the public’s view? My own unscientific estimate is that the average gas tank is now about 20 gallons (big SUV’s make up for all the small imports and sub-compacts with small tanks) which means that consumers are saving something in the range of $20 a week in gasoline purchases, on average. It is far from a huge difference but it is enough to put a rosier hue into most people’s economic outlook.

Does it seem far fetched to you that the friends of Dick Cheney, and all the companies that his associates at Halliburton service, would be willing to forgo a slight and temporary dip in profits this quarter in order to assure that Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate? Especially in light of all the record profits reported in recent fiscal quarters from almost all of the major oil companies, which has been accompanied by very little talk of windfall profits being taxed away coming from the Hill? Seems like the least a corporation could do for such good friends, doesn’t it?

Let’s do the math just for fun. Assume your vote was “worth” $2.00 in 1906 before most of the campaign finance reform legislation existed (not that it prevented Chicago from becoming the city where former Mayor Daley’s campaign slogan was “Vote Early, and Vote Often”), starting around 1907 (after the election year, one can presume). Let us further assume an overall inflation rate at 50% per decade since then (a modest 5% annually). I will spare you the tedium of year by year figures, but that would bring us to a value as of 2006 of $115 and some odd change. Now, assuming you discount any contributions of the oil companies by all money you may have already received in gasoline savings (I don’t want to accuse any of my readers of accepting bribes) :o). That means that with 6 weeks to go to Election Day, and savings of $20 per week (more if you drive an SUV, of course) that comes to $120 over the remaining course of the campaign.

So the question becomes, “Is your vote worth less now than it would have been in 1906?”

By extension, of course, we should consider the questions of, “Are you willing to go back to serving the same economic forces that brought us gas prices approaching $4.00 a gallon just last summer?” and “Do you really want to be paying the ‘tax’ of breathing more and more polluted air for the rest of your life?” and “Does the prospect of global warming obliterating most of the world’s coastal cities within the lifetime of your grandchildren really scare you, or is it something to let the next generations worry about?”

Last summer”? Wasn’t that just 10 days ago? How short are our attention spans? Do we need a new acronym? How about “OCADD”? That stands for “Oil Crisis Attention Deficit Democrats”, or maybe “OCABDADD” which stands for “Oil Crisis and Budget Deficit Attention Deficit Disorder.”

I am joking. I really dislike acronyms, especially when bandied about carelessly.

Besides my aversion for acronyms, I was trying to be clever. I do not truly believe we HAVE an “oil crisis.” We have an investment crisis. We have an investment crisis that includes all sorts of infrastructure investments that are not being made, sacrificed on the altar of political expediency and vote pandering. Of course, the politicians are not the only ones to blame for this neglect. If the public did not succumb to these seductions of the short money in trivial amounts we wouldn’t be having many of these problems. But they do, and we do, and voting our wallets with a short-sighted perspective is far too common a problem, at the polls and on Wall Street, too.

We wouldn’t have gotten ourselves into this mess if we had had the will and the investment climate to develop oil sands and oil shale processing capabilities 30 years ago. Not just one or two pilot plants, but a real commitment to making domestic self-sufficiency a national strategic priority. Do you really think that the $300 billion spent on the Iraq war wouldn’t have been enough to build energy self-sufficiency from our own resources? Sure it costs a billion or two to build a refinery, but say we added just 100 more refineries in Colorado and Alberta over the last 20 years?

Now before you throw in my face that revisionist history is not very constructive criticism, let us look at what can be done today. Today, we know how to make diesel from all sorts of above-the-ground sources. We know that some sedimentation of carbon compounds into the lithosphere is inevitable, and that the return of some of it to the atmosphere is too. We do? Really? Yes, at minimum volcanic activity puts carbon in various forms back into the atmosphere. But it stands to reason that as long as we are not adding carbon-based greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, perhaps at least we can hold the line on man-made contributions to global warming, barring sci-fi schemes like orbital power stations beaming microwaves to receiving stations on the ground.

We can be, and surely because of the commitment of the automobile industry, we are heading towards significant diversion of fuel demand from petroleum-based fuels like gasoline to carbohydrate-based fuels in the form of ethanol, even though in most cases this is less than 100% ethanol and still requires at least 15% gasoline. BMW, meanwhile has a 12 cylinder, 180 mph racing car that runs entirely on hydrogen as its only fuel. No, not an electric car, not a hybrid, it is a hydrogen burning internal combustion engine. Additionally, the consumer version of this engine design is intended to accommodate the use of gasoline as a “backup” fuel for those occasions and locations that lack sources for the hydrogen fueling process. BMW has already announced a production model of their 700 series based on an internal combustion hydrogen “flex fuel” design that will be available in “limited quantities” (reportedly only about 100 vehicles and on a “lease only, no buy-out option” basis) for the 2007 model year, according to the BWM Car Club of America.

The whole ethanol/biomass/biodiesel field is bubbling with excitement these days. Several companies and organizations contacted me with encouraging news following my last column. There are definitely companies in more advanced stages of cellulosic biomass enzyme enhancements than the researchers in San Diego that I reported. The reason I mentioned them, at least in part, was that it seemed remarkable to me that scientists and engineers working on the challenges of breaking cellulose into fermentable sugars should have taken so long to come up with the concept of duplicating (and more specifically the practical methods of extracting and replicating) the process of termite digestion which was well enough known that it was part of my first year biology class in 1968. (Actually, it was the equivalent of an “AP” high school class, though when I took my first biology class at Carleton University it used the same text book for the “next level” credit too.)

Sugar cane may not be as suitable a crop as for much of North America as it is in more tropical Brazil, but neither is it the only crop from which the majority of the plant produces high concentrations of sugar. Sugar beets may have lost in the “flavor wars” to companies promoting “pure cane sugar”, but there is plenty of it made. It is also, being a root crop, suitable for growth in far more moderate climates, and adaptable to most of the arable soils in all of North America (okay, that again isn’t a scientific conclusion, just one that is based on my small bit of practical experience in gardening and feeding cattle on “junk” crops of a “nuisance” vegetable called “mangelwurzel”). Currently British Petroleum, “BP,” is partnering with DuPont and British Sugar Corporation to convert an ethanol plant to experiment in producing biobutanol from beets according to an article in Wikipedia. Biobutanol is reportedly higher in energy density than ethanol, but lower in octane rating. However, and I will note here that the Wikipedia article is flagged as being of “disputed” impartiality, biobutanol is reportedly more tolerant of water contamination, better at cold weather engine starts than ethanol, as well as less corrosive such that it could be shipped in a gasoline blended form though existing pipelines.

I find it encouraging that so many avenues of alternative fuel production are being explored. It does remind me, however, of that Chinese curse, “May you live in ‘interesting times’.” We live in positively exciting times. The last 50 years have seen such significant improvement in food and agriculture that we no longer have a world food shortage, we have a food distribution problem to solve worldwide. We no longer have a looming “oil crisis” we have a technology explosion that promises to wean us from our dependence on fossil fuels. We have created so much international economic interdependence that only the most rampant of militarists consider massive mutually assured destruction as a serious threat to world peace. But we do have problems. We need to look seriously at what our governments and institutions (including the commercial institutions of multinational corporations) are doing to solve those problems, and we need to ask ourselves if we feel safe in their hands or whether it is time to seek new directions.

I think my vote is worth more than a day’s wages worth of short term gasoline discounts. What is your vote worth to you? Maybe you might even want to consider putting one tank’s worth of discount cash into the political campaign of your choice for the candidate or candidates whose stated goals and objectives most closely match your own.

Let’s not make this the year of the “PADD” (translation: Political Attention Deficit Disorder).

Love

Stafford “Doc” Williamson