Hey, did you hear? We Americans "deserve" something. Apparently we "deserve" relief from high gas and oil prices.
At least that's what a person would figure if they read, listen or watch the news. The papers and airwaves are filled with politicians, in both parties, huffing and puffing and promising Americans they are going to find out who's behind high gas prices and make them stop doing whatever it is they are doing.
Just who those perps might be depends on the politician who is organizing the posse. Right wingers blame environmentalists for blocking drilling in Alaska and offshore. Left wingers blame the oil companies. And both sides flail at OPEC and shadowy "speculators" on Wall Street.
And we buy it -- or at least we buy whichever straw-men that fit our own political bias and get us, personally, off the hook.
Talk about a case of national denial! Poor babies. All those evil people picking on us innocent Americans. Jeeze, all we've been doing is what Americans have been doing since the end of World War II -- living it up bingeing on finite world resources we figured we had first dibs on anyway.
What a pack of whiners we are. (And if any of what follows applies to you, and you're offended, good.)
Relief? You demand relief, do you? Well:
- Does that little lady, whose head only barely clears the steering wheel of her Ford Expedition, "deserve" relief from high gas prices? Does she? She claims she bought the damn thing because it makes her and the two 60-pound kids "feel safe." What a crock. It doesn't make her feel safe, it makes her feel powerful -- a rush staring down on those who surrounding her on the road. So SUV gals don't deserve relief. They deserve a swift, unceremonious kick in the ass.
- How about hubby? You know the type, Mr. Macho who lives in well-paved suburbia, but who just had buy a giant 4-wheel drive pick-em-up truck, even thought the biggest thing he carries every week is a 25-bag of dog food. Does Mr. Macho "deserve" relief? I don't think so. They not only have to have a giant engine, but weigh these behemoths down even more with flood lights and chrome. Then they have drive a hundred miles just to find some rutted dirt road where they can get the essential ingredient -- macho-mud -- on their truck. What these guys deserve is just what they're getting right now... a vehicle that sucks $4.50 gas even when parked.
(Note: And there's a special parking place in hell for those who not only bought a giant 4-wheel drive SUV, but figured it had to be a Cadillac Escalade -- the perfect blend of style and stupidity.)
And what about all those baby boomers who just had to buy a 4000-square foot home now that the kids are gone. Do they "deserve" lower heating and cooling bills? After all, keeping that hot tub piping hot 24 by 365 can really run up the old utility bill.
Then there's those of us with the shopping skills of 8-year olds. We seem unable to separate product from packaging. We fall for all the shopping aisle glitz of purely cosmetic plastic (oil-based) product packages. Was it the New Math that somehow put the notion into our heads that a fancy 24-oz plastic package that actually only contains 16-ounces of product actually contains more than that? Do such Pavlovian shoppers really "deserve" lower supermarket prices -- our a dope slap to the back of the head?
Do those who turn their noses up at locally grown/produced products, in favor of the same stuff that had to be shipped, flown and driven from halfway round the earth, "deserve" lower prices?
You get the point. The average American consumes 25-gallons of petroleum/petroleum based products per day -- times 300 million Americans .All this mindless, selfish, thoughtless, self-indulgent wasteful behavior is a part -- a big part -- of why energy prices have spiked and will spike higher. And none of the BS being shoved at us by politicians, the media and industry is going to change that. Because there is no "relief" from the kind of stupidity I just describe. In fact, unlike oil, stupidity is apparently in endless supply -- in Washington, on Wall Street and on your street and mine.
But hey, it's not our fault that all of a sudden oil has jumped from $21 a barrel eight years ago to $135 a barrel today, and rising. And it also apparently has nothing to do with whatever it was Dick Cheney and those oil executives (he still refuses to identify) decided back in 2001.
It's not us. It's those damn "speculators." They're terrible people-- capitalists, I hear. They're the kind of folks who study and track market-based trends with exotic names like "supply" and "demand." Then they put their money where their mouths are, betting prices will rise or fall in the future. These days their computer models scream two facts: that we Americans will stubbornly cling to our wasteful ways, and that, this time around, 2 billion folks in China and India are doing their very best emulate our bad example.
Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.
as was another man about my age, me in my 4 cylinder pick-up and him is his Cadillac Explorer, and I made an off-hand comment that I thought we should invade another oil-rich country.
He laughed and answered he didn't care, he doesn't even pay attention, he just gases-up and pays.
I responded that he answered like a true Republican. If that answer bothered him, it didn't show.
Now mind you this is an oil-state with much of it's industry tied directly to how well oil does. When oil is high there's lots of work. And I feel sure this man was exactly what he appeared to be, a well-healed oil man, and he didn't care - he had his and to Hell with the rest.
Between where this cretinous glutton is and those fools and poor families who bought into a phantom American Dream who are the ones really hurting, along with the rest of us, Mr."I Don't Care" - truly doesn't.
It's sociopaths like this that won't suffer until we dislodge their hands from our balls.
All my predictions are dire. It still mazes me the amount of ignorance and out-right stupidity. Why people can't understand simple "cause and effect" is always mystified me. The more outrageous a lie, the more apt people are to believe it. Only now those that commit the crimes are so outrageous you're not lying anymore.
I don't know if what I just said makes any sense, but truth now seems so outrageous as to be unbelievable.
I am sure of this - this little Fantasy Land is coming to an abrupt halt for most of us soon - so much so it might even effect Mr."I Don't Care."
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 20 diaries, 1781 comments)
on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 10:51:06 PM
Big Oils problem is we have too much oil. If the world only knew and there were competitive markets it would be selling at 5 dollars a barrel. Thomas Gold and the abiotic theory of oil means as we speak, those capped wells are filling up again.
The Bakken Oil Field has over 300 billion barrels of oil. Leigh Price of the USGS had an article under peer review and was knocked off in 1999. The USGS has since downgraded it to 3 billion barrels, saying most of it is not recoverable, despite prices increasing from 20 dollars a barrel when Price wrote his paper to 135 dollars.
And just in case the flood of oil can not be controlled, they give us the Anthropogenic Global Warming Bunny Terror hoax.
Our military machine runs on Oil. Do you think that if we really were running out of oil, and what with the National Security iimplications, that there would not be a Manhattan type Project to address this. hah.
Republicans had control of Congress and the Executive Branch for 4 years. Those restrictions on drilling could have been lifted. Big Oil makes more on imported oil, the profits get hidden offshore. They do not pay market price for oil and have no desire to produce more oil in the US. The fact this issue has not been raised until the Dems are on the verge of being handed back the power by our elite proves this.
by
pft (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 499 comments)
on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 1:58:24 AM
This is a good article and goes to the "entitlement" attitudes of Americans and also to the empty promises of our politicians as both sides assure us that it isn't our fault.
Regardless of whether it had been oil, air, water, food or any other finite resource, our base belief that "growth is good" would have eventually harpooned the flawed basis of our underlying economy.
As Mr. M said in his comment, "the predictions are dire." Mr. "I don't care" will at some point pull up to the pump and the attendant will say, "I hope it's not an inconvenience, but we are temporarily out of fuel at any price."
by
Mike Folkerth (120 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 566 comments)
on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 9:33:13 AM
3 comments
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