Letters: It's all about the energy mess

THE FREE-enterprise system is broken. Stupidity reigns. What's the root of today's economic distress? Does it have anything to do with the financial recklesness of Wall Street and our banking system bringing the economy to its knees? Certainly!

Warren Buffet described the "financial weapons of mass destruction." You make loans on the borrowers ability to repay, not on Wall Street repackaging them and passing the risk of default on to someone else.

But the real prime mover of today's financial mess is rooted in the oil condition of the country. We use almost 20 million barrels a day (42 gallons a barrel), and we used to produce 11 million ourselves. Production is now below five million barrels a day.

Since the laws of supply and demand rule supreme, which we unfortunately ignore, our soon-to-arrive sixth oil crisis will do to the economy what the iceberg did to the Titanic.

We have an astounding $13 trillion accumulated deficit that will be at the mercy of an oil crisis can easily bring a gas price of $10 or $15 a gallon.

Then what? Implosion of the economy?

What is most alarming about the situation is that oil is 39 percent of our energy supply and - in certain circumstances - the remaining 61 percent is in just as bad shape.

What are we going to do about this? Most likely continue to ignore it, unless you become involved now!

President Obama appears to be a nice guy, but his main focus is on his glorious reelection in 2012. But if you want to know the leaders of a society, you really have to look at its followers.

Obviously, the children of this country are about to inherit a large "bucket of warm spit" of a society, unless we get our energy act together now, right now!

As Thomas Jefferson once noted, "If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Bill Dunn, Philadelphia