I ain't been abusin' nobody.
Posted on 01/12/2006 11:01:33 AM PST by Barney Gumble
For the foreseeable future, petroleum will power the global economy. There is far too little of it to go around -- especially now that 2 billion Chinese and Indians are in the market. And the resulting scramble for oil warps all reason and common sense.
In our petroleum-paranoid world, ``No blood for oil'' was the common smear against removing oil-rich Saddam Hussein. Yet after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the global price skyrocketed. The shady deals of French and Russian oil consortia and the rot of the U.N. oil-for-food program were at last exposed. And Iraq's oil industry was, for the first time, under democratic control. No matter......
In the Orwellian world of petro-logic, sheikdoms and juntas that gouge 90 percent profits on each barrel pumped from the desert somehow have convinced their people that they still are daily victims of beer-bellied and twanged Texans.
Moreover, oil profiteering masks the abject failures of quite odious regimes. Take state Marxism, a crackpot philosophy whose heritage is impoverishment and mass death. But thanks to obscene profits, Hugo Chávez spreads cash subsidies all over Latin America under the guise of a successful ``socialist'' state -- as if his anti-democratic government, rather than oil luck and foreign expertise, enriched Venezuela....
Free-market libertarians reply that our oil is simply a commodity like anything else -- oblivious that current enemies of the United States are parasites and cannot even craft the weapons they use against us without a Middle East awash in petrodollars. Some environmentalists prove just as clueless....
If the left would push nuclear power and more drilling, and the right would push more mandatory efficiency standards and alternative fuels, the United States could cut its imports and collapse the world price....
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
vdh bump
Is this a fair trade-off? I don't think so. Nuclear and drilling have nothing to do with personal freedom, "mandatory" efficiency standards take away freedom....
Hey! I don't have a twang.
I ain't been abusin' nobody.
The opposition to nuclear energy proves the old axiom of politics making for strange bedfellows: oil companies and environmentalists are its biggest opponents.
And hey, if switching to nuclear will financially hamstring Al Quaeda, so much the better.
Incredibly, it was also the refrain in 2001 against removing the Taliban after 911.
Here are comments from one of our congress members in November 2001:
The predominant nationality of the terrorists was Saudi Arabian. Yet for political and economic reasons, even with the lack of cooperation from the Saudi government, we have ignored that country in placing blame. The Afghan people did nothing to deserve another war. The Taliban, of course, is closely tied to bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but so are the Pakistanis and the Saudis. Even the United States was a supporter of the Taliban's rise to power, and as recently as August of 2001, we talked oil pipeline politics with them.The recent French publication of bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth revealed our most recent effort to secure control over Caspian Sea oil in collaboration with the Taliban. According to the two authors, the economic conditions demanded by the U.S. were turned down and led to U.S. military threats against the Taliban.
It has been known for years that Unocal, a U.S. company, has been anxious to build a pipeline through northern Afghanistan, but it has not been possible due to the weak Afghan central government. We should not be surprised now that many contend that the plan for the UN to "nation build" in Afghanistan is a logical and important consequence of this desire. The crisis has merely given those interested in this project an excuse to replace the government of Afghanistan. Since we don't even know if bin Laden is in Afghanistan, and since other countries are equally supportive of him, our concentration on this Taliban "target" remains suspect by many.
Anyone know who this quote is from?
It's sounds like Goofball Ron Paul.
This has been a campaign by a faction of the most bloodthirsty neocons for quite awhile now. They act like Ariana Huffington or Gerry Brown in 1976. I think NRO politely doesn't run these pieces, but the Washington Times does.
Does anyone think there's anything "conservative" about this?
A former boss of mine who worked at a nuke plant said:
"Imagine doing everything you could possibly do to make every part of the operation as expensive as possible. Overpay for all maintenance parts, use way more people than could possibly have productive functions, make changing a light bulb an all day task for a team of union mechanics with days of paperwork to follow, and Nuclear Power is still the lowest production cost on the grid."
Oh, oh. That's going to get VDH in trouble with the free market loons. They're convinced that oil is subject to market forces the same as any other product, and that it responds to the supply-demand curve like peanut butter or panty hose.
But hey, what does HE know?
--b---
Apart from the planned-economy feel of increasing fuel efficiency standards, I think it's a good piece.
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