Oil--You Have to Pay For It

[from earlyblurs.com]


http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/ahmadinejad-in-latin-america.html

Nothing particularly amazing about the link, it's just one of a million random samples of the reality that being an oil-based economy has implications for the knee-jerk "wahl I thank we orta just kick some ass" boys down at the Texaco. Of course they'll still vote for Romney, still nod that he's durn tootin' when he opines that our current President has a weak foreign policy when it comes to Iran and the Middle East, running around apologizing and all.

The fact is, President Jimmy Carter, who knew a thing or two about putting peanuts in a Pepsi bottle, was absolutely right back in '77 when he said we needed to get unhooked from oil, and particularly from Middle East oil. The GOP of course harrumpfed, and Reagan ripped those solar panels right offen the White House roof as his first official act. And there's surely nothing but coincidence in the strange fact that Iran was in Reagan's corner in the election of '79, releasing the hostages which helped to sink Carter only after Reagan was absolutely and certainly elected and in office.

So here we are. Looking back, at the days when gas was 50 cents a gallon and the original Red Clay Ramblers, my self included, made a sort of living riding around the country in a gas guzzling Dodge van and playing bar gigs and festivals for more of Carter's peanuts, it's easier to see that if we'd just made a concerted effort, back then, to find a solution to a dependence on a fuel supply which came with being leveraged by people who didn't care to go along with our American solutions to life elsewhere, well by now we might have plumb avoided two or three nasty, costly wars, and for that matter, might even still be riding the elevators to the top of the World Trade Centers if we cared to.

Instead, we're pretty much still in the same place, and we still haven't figured out that using oil as a club tends to wack us as much as the club's intended addressee. As someone pointed out recently, if we manage to reduce the world's oil supply due to embargoing Iranian oil, a consequence will be rising fuel prices. And that will make money for oil producers, probably including Iran, and certainly including the other oil producing countries.

Oh, and yeah, the Oil Companies too. This, by the way, is how it also works for a guy like Romney, who has so much money that some of the green always flows his way.