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Just goes to show how big of a high interest loan we took out on the world's resources.

And now that the US dollar is declining and oil is traded in the dollar, we see this reality unfold.

Nice way to put things in perspective Tyler.

Just to pick on one oil company (no judgment here, just an example). According to a recent AP article:

"Chevron says profits jumped more than 9% in the first quarter as higher oil prices made up for weakness on the refining and chemicals side of its business.

The second-largest U.S. oil company earned $5.17 billion, or $2.48 per share, up from $4.72 billion, or $2.18, a year earlier."

Middle-east based terrorists attack in 2001. In response, we institute the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world to ... the middle east, and an assortment of all too often despotic regimes. Who says terrorism doesn't pay?

Talk about that "giant sucking sound." NAFTA and its ilk sent away jobs. But that is like a dustbuster on weak batteries in comparison to the industrial-strength pumps sucking this country's wealth away now.

So what is the point here? Do all you progressives want cheaper oil?

So 'someone' missed the point? I'm not surprised.

Whatever happened to hydrogen?

no, Brian, i do not want nuclear power. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't turn this into another nuke thread. (i know, i said it first, but i'm reading between your lines here...you have a very clear record.)

some "points" to choose from might include:
• war profiteering (uh...illegal?)
• supremely incompetent leadership at best (since when does a "good" leader inflict economic hardship on his/her people?)
•blatant and widespread corporate cronyism (the web of connections is tightly woven)

This is great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO5soX3iLtk

So with Obama we will have cheap oil? How will he do that?

Not sure anyone said Obama would make oil cheaper. Where'd you get that. On the contrary, Obama has gone out of his way to explain that there is no easy fix and he even pointed out that the Clinton/McSame gas tax holiday is a political shell game that will not address or fix the issue. He said that on the eve of a very important primary. So when it mattered most, Obama choose to tell the truth to us and to treat us like adults with a brain while both McBush and Clinton tried to bamboozle us.

Ok, so I guess he's not going to do anything. So what is the point of whining about it?

Ok, so I guess he's not going to do anything. So what is the point of whining about it?

I don't really think Tyler is whining with this article. He's merely pointing out the irony of high gas prices with two oil men in charge of the executive. It's like the snake story. You knew he was an oil whore when you voted for him.

Do all you progressives want cheaper oil? - Brian #4

So with Obama we will have cheap oil? How will he do that? - Brian #9

Ok, so I guess he's not going to do anything. So what is the point of whining about it? - Brian #11 and #12

You know what's going to be so refreshing about President Obama? He does nuance. He talks to people like adults. He doesn't treat every question like a three-second focus group-tested sound bite. He doesn't artificially set up an us vs. them, black vs. white scenario on every freaking issue like Brian does almost without fail.

Really, Brian, tell us how great $4 gas is, and tell us how much you are looking forward to $6 gas by next year. Tell us how important it is that we avoid investing in alternative energy and instead drill, drill, drill while building nuclear plants. Tell us how competitive we're going to be as a global economy in twenty years, with China owning a third of our assets. Tell us how climate crisis is a bunch of crap.

Tell us how much better off you think this nation is versus eight years ago. Tell us how great the Bush administration has been for the American people. How wages are up, how jobs have been created, how cost of living is down, how housing is affordable, how health care is affordable, how civil liberties have been preserved, how rancor partisanship has dissolved.

Go ahead, make your case for these guys. Someone has to.

I'm waiting for vision of how our world is suppose function with the progressives in charge.

Thanks for proving my point.

Brian, you are a child of God and we are fond of you, but you need your vision checked. When was you last eye exam?

How am I proving your point? you've said nothing.

Not sure why I'm responding, but here it goes...

I'm waiting for vision of how our world is suppose function with the progressives in charge. Brian #15

Even though we have already talked about this and you didn't seem interested at the time, may I suggest you read the book Plan B 3.0 which offers a wealth of solutions that appeal to progressives. At least read the last two chapters or read the review posted here at Caryn Bosson Editorial.

Rather than throwing out judgments about progressives, please investigate exactly what is being suggested.

wow, brian has been body slammed repeatedly. Somehow he finds the will to stick around for more punishment. This brian guy must be running on nuclear power or something. Then he's completely avalanched by Tyler! Does he even know it?! Has radioactive fallout completely frozen his neural pathways?!!!

OK Tyler, if I didn't know you to be an honorable person, I would use the old phrase 'figures lie and liars figure'. Perhaps we just found different information, kind of like Weapons of Mass Destruction.

January 2000 - Bush takes White House - Crude Oil $24.11

January 2006 - Democrats take Congress - Crude Oil $58.30

May 2008 - Democrats in control of Congress 2 yrs 4 months - Crude Oil $135

Fact is, none of them on either side are worth a damn. The people on this post don't like anything that would truly fix the mess. You want to go backward while the whole rest of the world laughs at you.

And Barack Hussein Obama will never be president. Of anything...

Fine riposte, anonymous reader.

Fact is, though, with Cheney's secret energy meetings and this administration's consistent undermining of the development of alternative energy sources, CAFE standards, lack of political influence over the Saudis, etc., the guys in charge are directly responsible for the predicament we find ourselves in.

And regarding Obama, might I point out that while at Harvard Law School (which he graduated magna cum laude), he was president of the Harvard Law Review. Just one step on the path of a career that will take him right into the White House.

I'm home today working in photoshop and talking to my delusional Ojai neighbors, helps me take breaks from my work actually. Let me check that doomsday book you all have been reading for solutions and I'll get back to you, BTW I never denied global warming - just man made global warming.

"The people on this post..."
Lazy thinking alert

Sorry mister math, the transitive property does not work with humans.

Reduce population:
The progressives can start now!

Stop eating meat ( eat lower on the food chain):

How will we impliment this?

$20 per ton carbon tax:

San Francisco has already started ! Bakeries are on the list, can we do this here in Ojai?

Ban deforestation:
How do we accomplish this in other countries?

I hope he doesn't mean do not use trees for lumber since it is a valuble renewable resource.

Ramp up clean energy, 1.5 wind turbins:

At least wind is more efficant than solar, but what do we do when the wind is not blowing? But realistically wind is a piece of the puzzle but a small one.
plant trees:

All for it !

Fluorescent bulbs:

They all have mercury in them, didn't you know that?

Did I cover everything?

Let's not make this a Brian bashing thread. It's pointless.

Brian appears to be asking what we progressives would do to fix the "oil problem". The two main problems on a microeconomic level are the collapse of the dollar and commodities speculation.

Oil is denominated in greenbacks. The greenback has fallen something like 70% since 2000. This is because we have an ever increasing trade deficit and because The Fed is printing money like there's no tomorrow. In fact, the M3 stat that is the best indicator of just how much money is out floating around in the economy was trending higher than ever before in March 2006 when the government up and said they were no longer going to report the statistic. They didn't want people to see the carnage anymore. They are printing all this money to try and lower the trade deficit, which is not working and has not been working for 20 years now, and because they are trying to keep the rapidly deflating stock and housing bubbles inflated. That's not working either. The fact is, while oil is trading sky-high in dollars, it is not at all time highs when denominated in Euros, Yen or Pounds Sterling. Oil is higher in those currencys, but much of that increase can be attributed to speculation in the commodities market.

The so called "Enron Loophole" in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) deregulated trade in energy commodities and has been translated to include all commodities. Interestingly enough, when Bill Clinton signed this bill into law he became the President with the most deregulation laws signed ever. Wow! And he's a Democrat--though definitely not a progressive. This irresponsible act is allowing extreme speculation in most of the commodities traded in this country. This speculation has been cited as one of the major reasons that there are shortages in grains and rice worldwide, causing food riots. Correcting for the collapse of the dollar by looking at oil prices in Euros reveals that as much as 30% of the rise in oil is due to reckless speculation on the commodities exchanges. By the way, the major players in the commodities markets in terms of oil are hedge funds--like the one Chelsea Clinton works for.

When you add these facts to the facts of Peak Oil, increased competition with China and India for scarce non-renewable resources, our mindless foreign policy, and collusion by the oil trusts on everything from refining to pricing, we all better get used to very expensive gasoline.

Enjoy those SUV's.

And stop buying Chinese made goods !

There's not a lot you can buy that isn't Chinese made now.

If you really want to stop the trade imbalance, bring back tariffs. Repeal Taft-Hartley so unions can come back. Legislate that all goods made offshore must adhere to at least the US minimum wage and other labor laws or place a serious tariff upon all imports that use "sweatshop-like" labor conditions. Enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act and break up the conglomerates and monopolies here. Raise the tax rate on the top income bracket back to where it was in the 60's. Repeal the regressive Reagan payroll tax increase of 1983. Uncap the payroll taxes altogether or at least raise it to $250,000/yr. Peg CEO salaries and compensation to 41 times the real production wage like it was in the 70's.

All of theses measures will help bring manufacturing back to this country and we can buy US made goods again.

The economy is out of balance because the wage gap in real wages has widened continually since 1973.

No less than T. Boone Pickens, a homey zillionaire who would like to make more money and is now into wind power, puts it pretty plainly. For all of the conspiracy theorists, it is simple math that describes the oil problem - not secret Dick Cheney meetings.

Daily oil production: 85 million barrels
Daily oil demand: 87 million barrels

Speculators run amok and they are a permanent part of the system. Wait until you guys see the system they devise for speculating on carbon credits! You're going to sh** little green apples on that one! But I digress...

Unless you live in a cave (or in Ojai), you know that China and India are demanding their share of oil, and are WAY behind the evil USA in environmental responsibility.

Production increases are unlikely because there is a refining capacity problem and a exploration and development problem, both produced by environmentalist whackos.

And Brian is right, as far as he goes. The climate is always changing - not out fault. And who is to say that this climate is the 'right' one? For whom? Decided by whom? God? Al Gore? Oh wait, God is real, and Al is...what is he, actually?

By Greg Palast for TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org
[New York, May 22, 2008.]

I can’t make this up:
In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it.

The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel.

It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now.

Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news from the Fox-holes.

Let me explain.

In 1928, oil company chieftains (from Anglo-Persian Oil, now British Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and their Continental counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due to rising supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by their successors during the Clinton years, when oil traded at $22 a barrel.

The solution then, as now: stop the flow of oil, squeeze the market, raise the price. The method: put a red line around Iraq and declare that virtually all the oil under its sands would remain there, untapped. Their plan: choke supply, raise prices rise, boost profits. That was the program for 1928. For 2003. For 2008.

Again and again, year after year, the world price of oil has been boosted artificially by keeping a tight limit on Iraq’s oil output. Methods varied. The 1928 “Redline” agreement held, in various forms, for over three decades. It was replaced in 1959 by quotas imposed by President Eisenhower. Then Saudi Arabia and OPEC kept Iraq, capable of producing over 6 million barrels a day, capped at half that, given an export quota equal to Iran’s lower output.

In 1991, output was again limited, this time by a new red line: B-52 bombings by Bush Senior’s air force. Then came the Oil Embargo followed by the “Food for Oil” program. Not much food for them, not much oil for us.

In 2002, after Bush Junior took power, the top ten oil companies took in a nice $31 billion in profits. But then, a miracle fell from the sky. Or, more precisely, the 101st Airborne landed. Bush declared, “Bring’m on!” and, as the dogs of war chewed up the world’s second largest source of oil, crude doubled in two years to an astonishing $40 a barrel and those same oil companies saw their profits triple to $87 billion.

In response, Senators Obama and Clinton propose something wrongly called a “windfall” profits tax on oil. But oil industry profits didn’t blow in on a breeze. It is war, not wind, that fills their coffers. The beastly leap in prices is nothing but war profiteering, hiking prices to take cruel advantage of oil fields shut by bullets and blood.

I wish to hell the Democrats would call their plan what it is: A war profiteering tax. War is profitable business – if you’re an oil man. But somehow, the public pays the price, at the pump and at the funerals, and the oil companies reap the benefits.

Indeed, the recent engorgement in oil prices and profits goes right back to Bush-McCain “surge.” The Iraq government attack on a Basra militia was really nothing more than Baghdad’s leaping into a gang war over control of Iraq’s Southern oil fields and oil-loading docks. Moqtada al-Sadr’s gangsters and the government-sponsored greedsters of SCIRI (the Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq) are battling over an estimated $5 billion a year in oil shipment kickbacks, theft and protection fees.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the surge-backed civil warring has cut Iraq’s exports by up to a million barrels a day. And that translates to slashing OPEC excess crude capacity by nearly half.

Result: ka-BOOM in oil prices and ka-ZOOM in oil profits. For 2007, Exxon recorded the highest annual profit, $40.6 billion, of any enterprise since the building of the pyramids. And that was BEFORE the war surge and price surge to over $100 a barrel.

It’s been a good war for Exxon and friends. Since George Bush began to beat the war-drum for an invasion of Iraq, the value of Exxon’s reserves has risen – are you ready for this? – by $2 trillion.

Obama’s war profiteering tax, or “oil windfall profits” tax, would equal just 20% of the industry’s charges in excess of $80 a barrel. It’s embarrassingly small actually, smaller than every windfall tax charged by every other nation. (Ecuador, for example, captures up to 99% of the higher earnings).

Nevertheless, oilman George W. Bush opposes it as does Bush’s man McCain. Senator McCain admonishes us that the po’ widdle oil companies need more than 80% of their windfall so they can explore for more oil. When pigs fly, Senator. Last year, Exxon spent $36 billion of its $40 billion income on dividends and special payouts to stockholders in tax-free buy-backs. Even the Journal called Exxon’s capital investment spending “stingy.”

At today’s prices Obama’s windfall tax, teeny as it is, would bring in nearly a billion dollars a day for the US Treasury. Clinton’s plan is similar. Yet the press’ entire discussion of gas prices is shifted to whether the government should knock some sales tax pennies off the oil companies’ pillaging at the pump.

More important than even the Democrats’ declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits are the spoils of war.
And that’s another reason to tax the oil industry’s ill-gotten gain. Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable.

*****************
Greg Palast is the author of, “Trillion Dollar Babies,” on Iraq and oil, published in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

Palast is currently working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on investigation the latest attacks on the right to vote in America. Support this effort and receive a signed copy of Armed Madhouse from the author at Palast Investigative Fund.

View Palast’s commentary on oil and war windfalls on Air America Radio’s Palast Report – on YouTube here.

"I can't make this up"
- uh, yes you can.

all we are missing here is "Twilight Zone" theme music...

it's official: ALL of the gasoline in the Ojai Valley costs more than $4 per gallon. this has not once been the case since i started collecting the data for ojainews.com in June of 2007...the 87 Octane has been hovering as close as $3.99/gal lately but never crossed that threshold. as of today's collection, however, the LOWEST gas price in the valley is $4.09 (at two stations, one of which is the Union 76 across from Vons, which historically is one of the most expensive...WHAAAT?)

Not suprizing.