Tuesday, April 18, 2006

If We're at War, President Bush Should Limit Oil Profits

By Gene C. Gerard

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Posted 04/18 | Add a Comment

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  1. It is unfortunate that the worlds largest middle class is so busy working to survive, that they don’t have enough time or energy to send strong signals to our government. Malcolm X had the right idea, if the country could rally around the idea of everybody taking off just one day of work, may be we could get the attention we are seeking. We are paying the most exhorbitant prices for fuel, housing, taxes, etc. and the human cost of the soldiers and citizens dying for the war on terrror. President Gerge W. Bush will go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever. The story that prompted these impromptu comments was concerning the White House limiting the amount of profits the oil companies could make during a time of war--one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read, given that the country is run by a FAILED CEO of an oil company.

    Posted by robert smythe from new jersey  on  04/20  at  01:55 PM

  2. Ah, yes, that mass strike idea.

    Posted by Theo from Greece  on  04/21  at  08:57 PM

  3. “If We’re at War, President Bush Should Limit Oil Profits” reminds me of the following passage from a recent slide presentation, by Dmitry Orlov, titled, “Closing the Collapse Gap”:

    “The term “market failure” seems to fit the energy situation in the United States. Free markets develop some pernicious characteristics when there are shortages of key commodities. During World War II, the United States government understood this, and successfully rationed many things, from gasoline to bicycle parts. But that was a long time ago. Since then, the inviolability of free markets has become an article of faith.”
    ~ Closing the Collapse Gap (Slide 18)

    What disturbs and concerns me more than the obvious fact that Big Oil capitalists are exploiting their advantage is the unwillingness of the American left to embrace and explore Peak Energy.

    Trying to communicate Peak is exhausting, alarming, and most of all sad and disheartening.

    Say what you want about James Howard Kunstler--he often rubs me the wrong way to say the least--but we ignore the heart of his mind at our own peril.

    He makes the following timely points in his most recent blog entry:

    “The group that used to composed the broad American middle class of industrial workers and managers is disintegrating economically. What will concern them in the years just ahead will be their ability to barely hang on to what they’ve got, including the roofs over their heads and their health. They will be in no mood for a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.”

    [...]

    “The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods. That is why suburbia will turn out to be such a fiasco—because the public realm, and everything in it, was impoverished, turned into a universal automobile slum, while the private realm of the house and the car was exalted. The private goods of suburbia will now have to be liquidated and we will be left with little more than parking lots and freeways too expensive to use.”

    [...]

    “The obvious problem, of course, is that the American public doesn’t want to make other arrangements. It wants desperately to hold onto the old arrangements. The nation is stuck with its enormous investments in car-dependency, and what has remained of our economy lately is devoted to creating even more of it—in the face of signals that we won’t be able to run it no matter how much people like it.

    “Progress isn’t what it used to be, and it isn’t what it seems. If Americans get what they deserve they may give up on both progress and justice.”
    ~ http://kunstler.com/mags_diary17.html (May 15th Entry)

    Posted by David Emanuel from New York  on  05/14  at  01:43 PM
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