T. Boone Pickens has broadcast his way right into the middle of a presidential election debate about United States energy policy. Americans are upset about $4 a gallon gasoline, and the iconoclastic oilman has bought a lot of air time to tell us what he thinks about the situation.
Pickens' views have injected some fresh air into the public dialogue, and most of his ideas stand up pretty well to the scrutiny of serious energy analysis. But we must be careful not to replace one set of problems with another.
His ads and web site warn about the money sucked out of the American economy by its negative balance of trade in energy. Pickens has identified a problem as least as big as high prices at the pump. The energy trade deficit is larger than our trade imbalance with China and far more costly than the war in Iraq. Moreover, much of the money ends up in the hands of America's enemies. Though some laissez-faire economists find this situation acceptable, it's hard to argue that our dependence on foreign oil can be sustained at current levels over the long haul without further damage to the dollar and the general U.S. economy.
The recession is really taking its toll in the US and over here in the UK, every day more and more people are getting further and further in debt. The US and the UK housing markets are spiraling ever downward with house prices dropping on a daily level. The numbers of repossessions are increasing daily with more and more people getting behind with their mortgage payments. The cost of fuel and food has gone up in leaps and bounds making the poorer and the elderly more vulnerable. During the last weeks we have seen the unthinkable with national banking institutions in serious trouble laying staff off and downsizing, also major job losses and downsizing in some of the largest building companies in the UK and the US.
Peter Drucker once said, "...The most important contribution...in the 21st
century is...[the] increase productivity of Knowledge Work and the
Knowledge Worker."
Drucker recognized in the early 60s what has already proven to be true
in the present age: US businesses would soon undermine themselves with
information gluttony. According to the latest reports coming out of
Berkeley, about 400,000 TERAbytes of new information is generated each
year by e-mail alone. And yet, 59% of US companies did not have any
e-mail retention policies. US Corporations spent $4.6 billion in 2005
to analyze their internal e-mails, but still 62% of these same
corporations doubt they would be able to show that their e-mail records
are accurate and reliable.
In this current age of the "Information Superhighway," companies
literally "do not know what they know." And for attorneys who must
review this avalanche of information (often from multiple sources) to
ferret out "smoking guns" for a trial, this problem of information
overload is much more compounded. (continued...)
