To hear Kay Bailey Hutchison, the retiring U.S. senator from Texas, respond to President Obama’s weekly radio message last Saturday, you could guess that the Republicans don’t have an inkling about the danger posed by our national failure to recognize just one fact: we’re running out of cheap oil in this world.

Maybe she and others in both parties know something that we the people don’t know. Maybe it’s just as well that she announced her retirement last January, because if we relied on thinking like hers and her party’s, our lives would come to a virtual halt in short order.

After Obama finished his short talk on education and how innovative schools can make a difference in children’s lives, Senator Hutchison opened with the observation that things are tough for most working Americans and that the high cost of gasoline is causing them to make adjustments to their family budgets, such as choosing to fill the market basket or the old buggy’s fuel tank.

Then, she launched into the old Republican saw about our own domestic supplies of energy. She did not say, “drill, baby, drill,” but she wanted to. Here’s what she did say: “Unfortunately, rather than work to increase domestic energy production and help bring down gas prices, the Obama Administration is seeking to impose more regulations and taxes on oil and gas companies. This is placing our own valuable resources out of reach and stifling job creation – their proposals will actually increase pain at the pump.”

It’s likely that neither she nor her Republican colleagues have considered the reality of our situation regarding oil and gas and the fact that all of the easily obtained oil and gas has been retrieved and put on the market. Our oil supply is ebbing and we get most of our oil from other countries. For some reason, Republicans love to point this out and for a more bizarre reason, they love to point out that our oil is in countries where the people have come to dislike us. Some would say they hate us, but it’s not for our freedom.

Unless, that is, if you consider that U.S. leaders for generations have felt we are free to allow our corporations to go into other countries to look for resources we need. Our military and economic powers have allowed those corporations to act as if those resources belonged to them and the U.S. They have disposed of those resources as if they were. If we’re talking about that kind of freedom, perhaps they do hate us for our freedom. But that’s a far cry from the freedoms that are enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is doubtful that when George W. Bush said the terrorists “hate us for our freedom,” he was talking about the freedom to take their resources.

But, like most politicians, the senator ignored the reality of our production of energy, simply saying, “Our country needs a long-term policy that provides energy from our own ample natural resources. We can provide a clean environment and affordable energy for our nation’s families and businesses.” Complaining about the moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, she ignored the reason for the halt in drilling in the Gulf by the administration. She likely didn’t ask the people in the Gulf States who make their living from those waters whether they want the likes of BP (British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum, or whatever they call it today) to be putting their rigs back into operation. The Gulf may never recover from the spill and the chemicals they dumped into the water to disperse the oil. And, the regional economy that supports millions of Americans may not fully recover.

Senator Hutchison didn’t mention nuclear power or the hydrofracking of land to release the natural gas, which would have opened another can of worms (recall the Japanese tsunami and the moonscapes of gas exploration and extraction). Oil for her and other politicians in Texas is enough of an issue, especially since so many of them, along with many in the western states, depend on the largesse of the oil industry for their campaign funds and, sooner or later, for their personal incomes.

The byword of the day for both parties is job creation and she didn’t disappoint on that score, either. She pointed out that, for nearly a year, American energy producers were sidelined by the moratorium. “Exploration slowed to a halt. Thousands of American workers found themselves out of a job,” she said. She’s right to be concerned about several thousands of workers in the oil related industries, but doesn’t she know that there are some 15 million Americans looking for work?

Although the nation’s unemployment rate has dropped to about 8.9 percent, the black unemployment rate is nearly double that and, among young African-Americans, the rate is a staggering 40 percent. This is a social, political, and economic problem that politicians would be wise to address, as if it were the emergency that it is. So, we can assume from her talk that Republicans are concerned about several thousand energy jobs, but what about the millions that are needed in every other area of the economy? The GOP and its candidates for the presidential nomination talk about jobs, but they don’t have a plan to create jobs. At least, if they have one, they haven’t told us about it.

As far as the price at the pump goes, drilling in our own country does not guarantee any greater supply for the U.S. As we are beginning to understand, the oil that is taken out of the ground, on land or off shore, goes into what could be called the “world pot.” It would be sold on the world market and, as China and India become more affluent, they are going to need and demand a larger share of the world’s oil resources. The U.S. is just going to have to get in line like the rest of the world.

So, Senator Hutchison’s little rant about the failure of Obama to allow further drilling in places like the Gulf was, as usual, part of the continuing effort to shore up profits for the oil companies and others, even as oil becomes more difficult to extract.

There are many on both sides of the political spectrum who say that there is enough oil “right here at home,” to keep us going for a hundred years, and they mention the tar sands in the Canadian province of Alberta. Take a look at what it takes to get the oil out of that ground and look at the cost.

According to such thinking, there is no place sacred enough to protect it from the devastation of oil or gas exploration…it’s messy, it’s dirty, and it’s toxic. But we need the oil, if we are to maintain the kind of life we have been leading for some five decades. Since the senator is a Texan, this should make it plain for her: suppose we heard that there was oil under The Alamo. Would we bulldoze it and set up rigs to pump oil? Of course not. There are many other places in the U.S., which Americans hold in equally high regard, and this fight to maintain a disappearing life style (the car culture) will pit drill-baby-drill people against those who hold some things sacred and are willing to fight to save those places.

Republicans tend to ignore the environmental costs of modern consumption of oil and Democrats too often tend to follow their lead. Instead of a head-on debate about the future of modern societies, we have a dance of death, with the GOP and their right wing singing the song of the status quo. There is no climate change really, they say, so we can just go on the way we are. Most Democratic politicians appear to want to address climate change, but they are just not up to the fight.

We Americans have created a way of life that is not sustainable in a time of dwindling oil and we’re not making any preparation for the massive change that will be required. We are not even having the necessary debate. The major parties are setting up job creation to be the main issue in the coming presidential election. For Senator Hutchison, taking care of her oil friends will create some jobs, but what are 10,000 or even 20,000 oil industry jobs, compared with the 15 million we need in an economy as large as ours?

Politicians have not been candid about the condition of the economy. They didn’t level with us on the bailouts. They did a lot of fast-talking about identifying the beneficiaries of the bailouts. They do a shuffle about who pays taxes and why corporations and the rich don’t pay their share of taxes (if they pay them at all). They are afraid to face the specter of climate change (even as we are seeing some of the terrible storms that many climate scientists warned about). There has been a lot of double talk for a decade about the wars we’re engaged in and whether a single day of them has been legal (from the standpoint of treaties and international law). We are still waiting for a discussion, let alone national debate, on what we are going to do when we actually start running out of oil. It seems that we are going to need considerable lead-time to deal with that problem, say, a couple of decades.

What’s needed is a politician with a spine and a position powerful enough to start the debate. Let’s see if there are any takers.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.