Truman on ownership of energy resources

On offshore resource rights and power production, US President Harry S. Truman in a 1952 speech:

The minerals that lie under the sea off the coasts of this country belong to the Federal Government--that is, to all the people of this country.

If we back down on our determination to hold these rights for all the people, we will act to rob them of this great national asset.

That is just what the oil lobby wants. They want us to turn the vast treasure over to a handful of States, where the powerful private oil interests hope to exploit it to suit themselves.

Talk about corruption. Talk about stealing from the people. That would be robbery in broad daylight--on a colossal scale.

I got a letter from a fellow in Texas today, who is a friend of mine, and he was weeping over what the schoolchildren of Texas were going to lose if Texas didn't get its oil lands 9 miles out from the shore. And I composed a letter to him, and then didn't send it. I said what about the schoolchildren in Missouri and Colorado, and North Dakota and Minnesota, and Tennessee and Kentucky and Illinois, do they have any interest in this at all? Evidently not, it should all go to Texas. Well, it isn't going there, if I can help it.

I can see how the Members of Congress from Texas and California and Louisiana might like to have all the offshore oil for their States. But I certainly can't understand how Members of Congress from the other 45 States can vote to give away the interest the people of their own States have in this tremendous asset. It's just over my head and beyond me how any interior Senator or Congressman could vote to give that asset away. I am still puzzled about it. As far as I am concerned, I intend to stand up and fight to protect the people's interests in this matter.

There's another matter I don't intend to back down on. That is our party's pledge to develop the vast natural power resources of this country for the benefit of all the people, and make sure that the power produced by public funds is transmitted to the consumer without a private rake-off.

How could we back down on a pledge like that? When we look around us at the great good that has been done by the TVA and the Grand Coulee and the Southwest Power Administration--when we see what projects like these have done to improve the lives and increase the prosperity of our people-how could we possibly justify weakening our policy? We just can't do it.

I don't care how much money the power lobby puts into this campaign against us. I don't care what lies and smears they put out. There is a principle here which goes to the welfare of the country.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1296

COMMENT: Truman's fine words did not betray the gaps that often lay between his talk and his action. His government was riddled with corruption and contradiction. His legacy includes the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Senator McCarthy's Communist persecutions, the US-led Korean War presaging similar aggressive US warfaring in Vietnam and Kuwait/Afghanistan/Iraq in successive generations.

Yet on three issues at least, offshore rights, power generation and civil rights and desegregation, he remained pretty true to his word.

His comments about privatizing what belongs to all citizens and the pressure of the oil lobby is acutely appropriate today, in Canada as well as the US.

Offshore rights are a case in point on all three of Canada's maritime coasts. Onshore, Canadians seldom ask by what principle should Alberta "own" the phenomenal petroleum resourceds that underlie its provincial boundaries. As the rights in the oil sands are now largely given away by Alberta for a pittance of their value to huge oil corporations, and British Columbia is in a frenzy to sells off gas rights, there are few voices saying "that's not yours to sell!"

In a tsunami of deregulation and privatization of power generation, Truman was speaking for our time, as much as for his, when he spoke of private 'rake-offs" and affirmed the principle of public ownership.

There's nothing of the spirit of Truman in the energy policies of Campbell, Klein or Harper. None of them are asking, "how could we possibly justify weakening our policy [of public ownership]?"

Harry S. Truman had no middle name. Wish I could think of some clever language to tie that fact to the substance of this piece. Ah well.