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ace, I posted reams of news reporting in the Jimmy Carter thread that discredits an argument that "the private sector" did anything in the post Carter administration, besides lobby the government to end subsidies to the solar power development, even as it bought up all of that industry's assets and reveresed the progress, to the point that a solar power plant in California was dismantled and sold, panel by panel. Carter recognized that price fluctuation of fossil fuels, whether induced by demand or by manipulation by suppliers and refiners....would discourage alternative energy development.

Carter's energy plan was sabotaged and then dismantled, and we are where we find ourselves today, as a direct result. We've just witnessed, in six weeks, a 33 percent decline in the price of gasoline. What does a sudden drop in price like this, do to prospects of attracting private investment into R&D of alternative energy? It' always been that way. Had the Carter energy plan of 1980, been left in place, had the Synfuel Corp. not been stacked with Reagan appointed, incompetent and corrupt crony management, and the solar energy industry not intentionally given away to "big oil", what return might we have enjoyed on those taxpayer financed investments?

Did the "private sector", trading scams carried out by Enron, as the Bush administration vowed not to involve itself in, benefit the consumers in California who were held hostage by price manipulation, and subjected to artificially influenced "rolling blackouts", as power supplies were deliberately diverted away from California, after deregulation of government controls over power supplies, made Enron's scams possible? Didn't Ken Lay pick who would head the government's FERC, in the new Bush administration?

ace, would you have supported the Standard oil petroleum and rail transport monopoly that Rockefeller built, more than a century ago? What you advocate doesn't work, ace. The "private sector" cares only about one thing, it's own profits. If the transfer of the US industrial base, first to Mexico, and then to Asia, doesn't teach you that lesson, what will? Your advocacy is incompatible with the US continuing to exist as a national entity, with defined borders, and it's own government and currency. The movement of investment focus and interest of the borderless, nationless, "private sector", drives home my point that, if the US is to have an energy policy that is in the national interest, it is not to be left up to the private sector to administer or to finance and regulate. We've done just that for 26 years, and we've borrowed a billion dollars, every day this year, to pay for petroleum imports, as a result of "private sector" driven, energy policy.