Oil and Death: Stuck in the 20th Century
Links and observations illustrating how the history of corruption underlying the hydrocarbon economy is restricting human progress.
Money Does Not Equal Progress
Prices and profits are up.
Wages are down.
The ice caps are melting.
The free market isn’t working and isn’t free.
Oil, Religion and Politics – the Poison Soup of the Middle East
Two thirds of proven world oil reserves are under the control of OPEC. Six of eleven OPEC nations reside in the Middle East. Four of their names read like a terrorism past/present hit parade: Iran, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia. Middle East conflict is rooted in the formation of Israel but it is financed by oil-producing nations and manipulated if not perpetuated by First World oil-consuming nations like the U.S. and those of Europe.
Middle East conflict has both Colonial and Cold War roots.
The honest mistake that is Israel:
Iran, Iraq and Syria versus the U.S. and Israel:
Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda:
The Insanity of Globalization without Conscience, Mindless Consumption and Hotrod Morality
The history of the automobile is the history of consumerism in the U.S. One need only watch today’s car and oil company commercials to understand that these corporations are not merely selling cars and fuel. They are selling desire and consumption! “When does a car become something more than a car?” goes one ad. NEVER! I find this advertising so offensive, in light of the environmental degradation, terrorism and war accompanying the hydrocarbon age, that I was compelled to poetry, writing new lyrics to Woodie Guthrie’s Riding In My Car (Car Song) which Nissan uses to pitch it’s Z-car.
If a definition for insanity is repeating the same failures over and over while expecting different results, then the hydrocarbon economy is by definition insane. It seems obvious that global trade cannot work if your trading partners – i.e. those with whom you practice mutual enrichment through trade – hate you and vow to ultimately defeat and kill you. But this is much the case in the hydrocarbon economy where oil consuming nations finance others espousing their destruction and every $1 increase in the per-barrel price of oil flows an additional $10 Billion to OPEC.
As long as ours is a world of sovereign nations, there is no national argument for enriching sworn U.S. enemies. Who funds Hezbollah? Iran. What funds Iran? Oil. Continuing enrichment of the Middle East with its absence of peace and open refusal to mutually coexist is simply insane. Eventually history will denounce the short-sighted, conscienceless, laissez faire economics of Milton Friedman in favor of the comprehensive, moral and balanced ideals of John Kenneth Galbraith. But by then it may very well be too late.
Money Does Not Equal Progress
Prices and profits are up.
Wages are down.
The ice caps are melting.
The free market isn’t working and isn’t free.
- Hydrocarbon alternatives are stifled due to unfair competition through subsidies and the lack of a carbon tax which ignores the negatives from burning hydrocarbons.
- Exorbitant U.S. defense spending is needed, in part, just to protect oil shipments.
- The $100 Trillion potential of diminishing reserves has skewed the market economics and corrupted governments responsible for its regulation.
Oil, Religion and Politics – the Poison Soup of the Middle East
Two thirds of proven world oil reserves are under the control of OPEC. Six of eleven OPEC nations reside in the Middle East. Four of their names read like a terrorism past/present hit parade: Iran, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia. Middle East conflict is rooted in the formation of Israel but it is financed by oil-producing nations and manipulated if not perpetuated by First World oil-consuming nations like the U.S. and those of Europe.
Middle East conflict has both Colonial and Cold War roots.
The honest mistake that is Israel:
- U.S. subsidization.
- The Sinai War fanned the flames of Arab hatred of Jews.
- The Six-Day War: Israeli expands by a factor of three through captured territory.
- Intafada, PLO and Hamas: the quest for Palestinian Arab suffrage and sharing of Jerusalem.
Iran, Iraq and Syria versus the U.S. and Israel:
- Iraq, the lie of WMD and the incipient Civil War.
- U.S. war attrocities: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Haditha.
- Hezbollah grows stronger politically with each repeated destruction of Lebanon.
- U.S. oil-colonialism in Iran created the Shah. The Shah’s corruption and brutality led to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and Khomeini’s political success provided a model for strengthening Islamic Fundamentalism
- But that didn’t stop the U.S. from selling arms to Iran to finance a guerilla war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda:
- 911, al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia: murder financed by your friends and allies.
- The Bush Family, Dick Cheney and Halliburton shows that greed not the desire for progress largely determines the course of events in the Middle East.
The Insanity of Globalization without Conscience, Mindless Consumption and Hotrod Morality
The history of the automobile is the history of consumerism in the U.S. One need only watch today’s car and oil company commercials to understand that these corporations are not merely selling cars and fuel. They are selling desire and consumption! “When does a car become something more than a car?” goes one ad. NEVER! I find this advertising so offensive, in light of the environmental degradation, terrorism and war accompanying the hydrocarbon age, that I was compelled to poetry, writing new lyrics to Woodie Guthrie’s Riding In My Car (Car Song) which Nissan uses to pitch it’s Z-car.
If a definition for insanity is repeating the same failures over and over while expecting different results, then the hydrocarbon economy is by definition insane. It seems obvious that global trade cannot work if your trading partners – i.e. those with whom you practice mutual enrichment through trade – hate you and vow to ultimately defeat and kill you. But this is much the case in the hydrocarbon economy where oil consuming nations finance others espousing their destruction and every $1 increase in the per-barrel price of oil flows an additional $10 Billion to OPEC.
As long as ours is a world of sovereign nations, there is no national argument for enriching sworn U.S. enemies. Who funds Hezbollah? Iran. What funds Iran? Oil. Continuing enrichment of the Middle East with its absence of peace and open refusal to mutually coexist is simply insane. Eventually history will denounce the short-sighted, conscienceless, laissez faire economics of Milton Friedman in favor of the comprehensive, moral and balanced ideals of John Kenneth Galbraith. But by then it may very well be too late.