What's that Got to Do with the Price of Gas?
Oh, God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh, Lord, God have mercy
All crimes are paid
When there's no future, how can there be sin?
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future, your future
Gore Vidal use to joke the four greatest words in the English language were, “I told you so.” I always thought it was funny, though never agreed. For me, “I told you so,” always brought back bad memories of campaigns, of me screaming and crying, “No, no, don't do that, do this!” That always meant things were going sideways, the ship was sinking and going down. Afterwards, “I told you so,” offered zero solace.
So let's talk about oil. How much you paying a gallon America? It's still far from peak price, but current price is eating the American and global economy alive, so take heart, eventually the price will come down. Our beloved and illustrious NYT has a non-ironic headline, Biden Has ‘Only Bad Options’ for Bringing Down Oil Prices. The piece is so atrocious on every account it'd take days to unwind, but let's pull a couple highlights.
First is,
“Two other oil-producing countries that could increase production — Iran and Venezuela — are U.S. adversaries that Western sanctions have largely cut out of the global market. Striking any deal with their leaders without securing major concessions on issues like nuclear enrichment and democratic reforms would be politically perilous for Mr. Biden.”
Iran and Venezuela are our adversaries because that's what we want, not them. These are National Security State connived idiocies. Domestically, there's no political peril to bettering relations with either country. Russia same thing, once again an adversary because that's the path our war-mongering National Security State devised over the last three decades.
Next the Times writes,
“The price of oil, the principal cost in gasoline, can still shoot up or tumble depending on events halfway around the world. And no president, no matter how powerful or competent, can do much to control it.”
Oh, please! I beg to vehemently disagree with the military industrial complex's paper of record. Much, though certainly not all, of the current spike in oil is directly due to the president's policies on Ukraine. He could have stopped this war with talk before it started and can still do so rather quickly now.
Which gets to Old Joe, who went into the Senate fifty-years ago, the same year of the first oil spike. Despite being obvious to a 12 year old that this meant oil was a limited and bound to be an increasingly expensive resource, no President, Congress, and certainly not the American people did much of anything to alleviate our oil dependency. Be proud America, it is one of the many things that unite us.
Amusingly, thank institutional memory for this, you haven't heard anything about conservation, car-pooling, buses, biking, and walking. That's Jimmy Carter and all those old Democrats inexplicably still running things in DC know the old Plains, Georgia peanut farmer means political death. They’ll soon find there’s others.
I was hoping Biden's term would be one of benign ineptitude, but unsurprisingly, it's become a malignantly destructive incompetence. Mark Ames astutely emailed this morning, “They don’t know how to control things and it’s making them dumber and more dangerous at an accelerated rate.”
The oil hammer isn't just smashing America, it's hitting hard across the planet. The FT has piece, “Fuel shortages across Africa hit motorists, airlines and radio stations”:
“Africa produces about 8 per cent of the world’s crude oil, but a lack of refining capacity means it imports almost all of its fuel.”
That use to be called imperialism, but in the last several decades it's called globalization.
I sent the FT piece to a Nigerian friend and he replied, “Yeah it's crazy. Abuja has had a perpetual fuel scarcity for over 2 months, ripple effect of the Russia-Ukraine war.” He’d disagree with the NYT about the president's ability to impact oil prices
We've let the National Security State destroy this republic, it's a sad, tragic tale.
I told you so.