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around the inability of the Bush administration to lower the price of gasoline to consumers in the U.S.
I've been paying attention, and I've seen them trying; but so far nothing they've done has worked, and I don't foresee them having success in the future, either. The way I look at it, the hold that Big Oil has on the seats of power in the world depends heavily on the industry's capability to deliver low-cost fossil fuel end-products to customers. "Low-cost" is the key term, and gasoline the key product; these are the linchpins everything else hinges on, literally, in my view.
(I'm so surprised to be asked for my opinion on this that I'm trying hard to sort out my thoughts and express them clearly here, so please be patient with me. I'll edit this as much as I can, but regrettably I've never been good at being concise. :))
Let me put it this way. The Bush administration has demonstrably *failed* to either keep gasoline prices low to Americans OR to see ahead to what was coming and prepare the public for it. They didn't plan well to minimize the impact of rising fuel prices on us as individuals and on American businesses.
We've all seen what a p*ss-poor job this administration does of planning, after all. And I think their idea of "looking ahead" has circled solely around trying to accomplish all the changes in government that were on their agenda from Day One. As many have understood, the two wars this president has sent our troops to fight are also attempts to control oil and gas prices -- but that isn't working out for him either. Bush is a bust, simply put. I believe he will go down in history as one of the worst presidents if not THE worst president this country has had. I've been watching for the signs ever since the Supremes put him in the White House in 2000, and my beliefs about this are largely based on what I know about the business his family is in and the state of that industry worldwide.
I happen to believe there *was* some foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks; but I can't prove it, I just surmise it. Someone else mentioned W's responses when he was told at the elementary school of the first and then the second airliners' striking the WTC towers, and this was the sort of thing that spoke worlds to me. I thought about this again later and figured maybe he knew something was going to happen but was shocked by the scope of the attacks.
In his early months in office, I felt others in W's world were planning and executing the "plots," just as they'd done during his first campaign for president. Who knows exactly who it was? ... his father, Cheney, Rummy, Karl Rove and Condi, Karen Hughes -- it's hard to say for sure. But IMO most likely it was a core group all along which had "the agenda" as well as the conspiracies to implement it firmly in mind.
If W had been completely in on the conspiracies from the beginning, I think he wouldn't have said a lot of the things he said during his first campaign. I also think he was actually surprised that the "big boys" chose *him* to run for president in the first place.
But what I see happening now is the whole conspiratorial structure they've had so much success with unravelling right before their eyes, due in part to one huge factor -- those rising gas prices. Yes, the war is going badly, both the one "on terror" and the one in Iraq, and it's costing George in his approval rating. But the gas prices ... now THAT's something I believe is definitely turning most Americans against him and his oil-based cronies in the White House, and I don't see anything those bums can do about it but sit back and watch it happen. I'm not sure there's a damn thing he could have done to keep gas prices down, but I see him biting the dust in a big way nonetheless as they continue to climb.
That the war in Iraq is going so badly now is adding to the reasons people have to report they have no faith in George W. Bush's leadership abilities anymore. How they ever had any is beyond me, but it's also beside the point, I guess. Fact is, I think that finally they've recognized his continual mouthing of pablum platitudes is just that, and it no longer satisfies.
I've known that Europeans and some others have been paying up to ten times the amount Americans have had to pay for gas at the pump for many years. I have wondered how long cheap gas in the U.S. could last, because it has been clear for some time that the OPEC crude oil supply was no longer reliable. I couldn't see any way that the sensible restrictions placed on exploration and delivery systems for crude by American companies on U.S. land were going to allow for continued low prices for crude and for gasoline.
Prospects for foreign oil coming on the market are not all that much better. I worked in the '80's for a bright young man who owned Avalon Exploration, a small but vigorous and successful company whose clientele the boss was expanding to Russia even back then. But Gorbachev was the man in the Kremlin then, and Putin is a whole nuther creature. He's no dummy and I don't think he's entirely motivated by personal greed like Yeltsin was. It's very hard to say what's going to develop on that count, and the same can be said of crude reserves in China and elsewhere.
But any way they slice it, I don't think the industry can ever again extract and deliver cheap crude, and then refine it into gasoline and many other products such as home heating oil and even plastics, so that petroleum products remain inexpensive as they have been for a long time. And as best I can foresee that will bring about near-catastrophic changes in how virtually everything is done and what it costs to do it.
Am I making any sense here?
It's true that Russia and the other former Soviet states do have a lot of crude in the ground, most geologists believe. But since the dissolution of the USSR and the subsequent hurling of their economic systems into near-chaos (with the much-touted Russian mafia playing some key roles), these countries lack the skills bases and infrastructure to perform the exploration and test drilling necessary to establish their actual reserves and bring the product to market.
The USA Network presented a remarkable program not long ago called "Oil Storm," which offered up one possible scenario for rapid deterioration in the present crude oil delivery and refining system in the U.S., making us rely even more heavily upon crude from elsewhere and driving gas prices here up to eight dollars a gallon. It was so realistic I was surprised. Someone had done their research and talked to industry insiders, for sure!
But really, all it takes is common sense and a few salient facts to understand that there was simply NO WAY Americans could expect the outrageously low gas prices at the pump to continue indefinitely. I think it all boils down to that, and many unpleasant and disturbing eventualities follow logically from the changing situation.
Now it's finally happening. I think most of us realize gas prices are never going to be truly cheap again. My guess is they will nevermore drop below two dollars a gallon, and frankly even three bucks a gallon is still dirt cheap compared to what most of the industrialized world has been paying already for some time. What I think of as "The Crunch" is just beginning for real, and it's already having drastic results in many areas, business and personal.
And all this *without* even a hurricane and then a supertanker-chemical ship collision taking out drilling platforms and crude oil refining and delivery systems in the Louisiana coastal areas as occurred in the Oil Storm fiction to set it off. Should events such as those happen, the dramatic impact of The Crunch would escalate immeasurably and virtually overnight.
That's what is so disturbing for me to think about, too -- just how FAST the energy system we've depended on for decades can fold in on itself once a couple of major things take place to disrupt it. I feel the war in Iraq, like the one in Afghanistan before it, has proven truly disastrous from this point of view, not just for the Bush administration but for Americans and Westerners in general, and eventually probably for global citizens as well.
I think it's pretty easy to calculate the overall effect on corporations of every ilk, on commuters and vacationers, on the airline, shipping, and land transport industries, of sustained high costs of fossil fuel products.
And think for a moment about how much fuel is required for an occupation army of over 135,000 (acknowledged) troops in Iraq plus those in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.
What I can't do because I'm not an economist or financial whiz is predict the specifics. But generally The Crunch is going to hurt us all, and George W. Bush will have to accept the blame because it's happening on his watch and because he keeps promising what he cannot deliver.
Thanks for the welcome to DU. :hi: I sure am proud to see what's happening here!
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