(snip)"Back in the late 20th century there were predictions that the 21st century would be characterized by “resource wars” where fighting breaks out between countries and aligned groups of countries, as they scramble to secure increasingly scarce commodities for themselves, principally oil and water. Barely had we entered the new century when a major resource war began, with the big surprise being that it was not some banana republic suddenly deciding to invade and loot its neighbor’s territory, but instead the most powerful country on earth muscling its way around an entire region on the other side of the planet in order to position itself to plunder its oil resources en masse for itself.
We have all heard about “Peak Oil”, which is oil production peaking and then tailing off gradually, due to finite supplies dwindling and remaining reserves being increasingly difficult and costly to both find and extract. The timing of the peak depends on who you listen to but is supposed to occur anytime between a couple of years ago and about 2020 - 2030, but in any event we are historically speaking close to it, and now, with the world population continuing to expand and booming demand from up-and-coming economies with massive populations like China and India, steadily increasing demand for oil is colliding with relatively fixed or even declining supply. The result of this can only be rising prices, which will continue to rise until demand moderates sufficiently to bring about a rebalancing of supply and demand. The big problem with oil is that it is so central to everything and still so incredibly cheap in relation to the energy it supplies and its sheer usefulness, that prices will have to rise to much higher levels before demand is choked off sufficiently to bring about an enduring state of balance between supply and demand - only in the case of severe global recession resulting in a big reduction in economic activity would this upward price pressure abate, and that, of course, is exactly what a continued steep rise in the oil price may bring about.
The United States, more than any other country, is an economy dependant on an abundant supply of cheap oil. The per capita use of oil in the US vastly outstrips that of most countries in the world, the two principal reasons for this being that the infrastructure of the country has been developed on the assumption that cheap oil will continue indefinitely, and the other reason is that taxes on gasoline are held are much lower levels than in many other nations for political reasons. Back around the middle of the last century the big oil companies in the US, with the collusion of government, set out to intentionally destroy the public transport system in the US, in order to force the population to use automobiles more and thus burn more gas netting more profits for oil companies, and they were largely successful in achieving this objective. For the same reason they also encouraged massive urban sprawl and the development of suburbia, so that millions of people have to drive huge distances to get to work - a reason why gas taxes have to be held at much lower levels than in other countries such as Great Britain, where they are exorbitantly high. Clearly, if affordable gasoline disappears, then the countless vast tracts of suburbia in the US will become middle class ghettoes. Once you grasp the implications of this you will immediately comprehend why the United States is particularly aggressive about access to oil supplies and will stop at nothing to secure them. The United States is structured geared to the profligate consumption of oil and would collapse without it.
The oil and gas reserves of the planet, which took millions of years to form, have been and are being plundered and burned up recklessly in the space of a mere one to two hundred years. Like greedy children cramming a sudden bonanza of chocolates and sweets into their faces until they have nothing left, individuals - and corporations and governments - have selfishly and thoughtlessly squandered this precious resource without any regard for the needs of future generations. You only have to look around you at the vast volumes of largely unnecessary traffic - businessmen flying halfway across the world to sign a paper, holidaymakers taking a four hour flight to lay on a sunbed in a gated compound and read for a week, commuters who drive for an hour or two to get to the office and whose work will be viewed by future historians as being of considerably less value than the energy they consumed in getting to their workplace. The scale of unnecessary consumption and sheer waste is mind-boggling, and, of course, it cannot and will not continue indefinitely. Once the energy that took millions of years to form and only two hundred years or so to burn up is gone, it’s gone. The day of reckoning will be upon us and human beings who have bred like flies on the back of this bonanza will face starvation by the hundreds of millions or billions if substantive measures are not taken in time to make good the energy shortfall by means of other fuels. This will be hard luck for the victims but great news for the planet which is groaning under the strain of unimaginable hordes of human beings projected to reach about 11 billion by the year 2050. Alternative energy sources such as wind and water power, which take a lot of energy initially to create and install, may not be available in sufficient quantity or in time to fill the massive void - it is thought to be only Uranium that has a realistic chance of meeting the enormous energy needs. We are now starting to feel the first winds of this energy - food maelstrom with sharply rising global food prices, caused in part by rising oil prices, already putting a huge strain on the world’s poor, many of whom are on the verge of starvation, if not actually starving. "(snip)
(snip)"According to their logic the US elites have good reason to feel pleased with themselves following the successful takeover of Iraq, even if the general public in the United States is unable at this stage to grasp what a “glorious achievement” it is. Iraq is known to have over 100 billion barrels of oil reserves. In addition to this the country is still relatively unexplored and there are an estimated 200 to 300 billion barrels more waiting to be discovered. Given that this is largely light crude, the most valuable type of oil, it doesn’t take much effort of the imagination to figure that US forces have seized control of one of the world’s greatest treasures, whose value dwarfs the cost of the invasion. The invasion of Iraq would therefore be a strong contender for an entry in the Guinness World Records as the greatest act of piracy in the history of the world. It makes the exploits of Blackbeard and Captain Jack Sparrow look decidedly tame. With this being election year in the US, various politicians try to curry favor with the voters by talking about “bringing the troops home”. So let’s be clear about this - the troops are not coming home until the infrastructure has been built to fully exploit Iraq oil resources, and to this end to partition off the local population who might otherwise interfere with production. In fact, a background level of violence is actually desirable at this time, in order to provide the excuse to keep the troops there. We should also not overlook the reality that the US elections are pure spin anyway, a charade. The United States is not a democracy and has not been for a long time. Its political system is a duopoly of power, with the same plutocratic forces controlling both the Democrat and Republican parties, the election being a 4-yearly circus to fool the masses into thinking that they live in a democracy. In one sense democracy is an absurd concept anyway - how can you allow ignorant, uneducated people the same vote as intelligent, discriminating people? The answer is that that you can - and then you program them to do what you want them to anyway via their favorite entertainment and media inputs. If you spend an hour of your time going down to the polling station to vote, you have just wasted an hour of your life, except that it can be amusing to watch the other fools wasting their time lining up - thinking that they are going to make a difference.
Complete control of the Mid-East, which the United States and the major oil companies are now close to having achieved, of course confers massive power over the rest of world, in particular over rising economic powers such as China and India and the immense leverage that this will in time afford can be used to steer these countries in whatever direction is desired. The US is believed to be involved in a strategic race against time to corner the bulk of the world’s remaining oil reserves, the control of which can then be used to dissuade countries like China from resorting to the wholesale dumping of dollars or US Treasuries, along the lines of “Try it and we’ll cut off your oil supply”, which one would expect to be couched in more diplomatic language. Because of its gargantuan levels of debt the US is acutely vulnerable now, but with time it plans to tip the scales back in its favor partly by sales of its recently acquired plunder. Anyone who has watched those David Attenborough nature programs about seal colonies on beaches will know that the US is like the “beach master”, the huge bull elephant seal, taking possession of all of the females on the beach and jealously guarding them, while China and Russia are the other strong contenders, who don’t quite have the strength or size to try to assert dominance and as a result can only make gains when the beach master suffers some drastic reversal of fortune. The irony is that China now has the power to stop the US in its tracks, by dumping its vast dollar and Treasury holdings, which would send the US economy straight over a cliff, but it is unlikely it will do this because it can’t stomach the consequences to itself or its people of doing so.
There are those who believe that the multinational oil companies and US interests will not be left in peace in Iraq to reap the fruits of their exploits. What these people don’t understand is that in order to make it possible to develop Iraq’s oil infrastructure and actually ship out the oil in quantity an apartheid system will be created across the country, which is scheduled to be partitioned and balkanized. The indigenous people will largely be confined to their towns and cities and specific rural areas and ruled over by the US installed puppet government - they won’t be allowed anywhere near the oil installations, which will be run mainly by imported technicians and service personnel. The country will essentially be run as an oilfield, with the original inhabitants being marginalized and viewed as incidental. The infrastructure for this system of control is currently under construction and as it approaches completion the vulnerability of US and coalition military personnel and consequent casualties will decrease significantly. "(snip)






Bookmarks