by Milo Clark
(Swans - June 5, 2006) While Bush and Blair are now feeling somewhat challenged by their exponentially expensive and increasingly deadly decisions regarding Iraq, pundits are piling up in great heaps of contradictory contrarian calumny. Yes, I did, and No, You Didn't are trumped, finally, by vociferous allegations about yo' mama. (See sources.)
Is we or is we not running out of oil? I suspect strongly that most everyone except those in the know thoroughly believe we are running low on fuels. Gas pump prices prove it, no?
Gray-bearded commodity investor and latter-day art collector Raymond J. Learsy says, emphatically, NO! In his view, supported by statistics and references galore, oil companies, oil politicians, and oil countries are liars and cheats. I am sure he finds strong agreement on that conclusion.
His solutions, however, are along lines that New Age enviros and ecos would applaud. Take Amery Lovins God, for starters. Lovins is guru at the Rocky Mountain Institute of Colorado.
Learsy says: Use Oil More Efficiently, Get Government to Help, Cut Use of Natural Gas by Half, Develop a Viable Biofuel Program . . . la de da. And, yes, get Saudi Arabia et al. to open their fields to American oil companies who will do a better job. Of what? Lying and cheating?
Running out of oil or not, Kunstler and Leeb insist we are headed for the trash heaps of history at breakneck speeds. There is certainly some historical probability that the last half of the twentieth century was an aberration, albeit generally a brighter one for some.
Hopes for a new century of enlightenment crashed on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates under the tarnished sterling leadership of Bush and Blair. Who would have guessed that the end of the twentieth would lurch into a more barbaric twenty-first? Try historian John Lukacs whom I have cited more than once.
Leeb, however, being first an investment counselor, advocates precious metals, energy companies, China and India, along with various deflation hedges. Shall we ignore the less than sterling returns from such strategies in the past? Kunstler believes we need a religious revival to counter the long emergency and return us to core values.
Perkins, Dinges, Kinzer, and Bacevich struggle to take the blinders off America's history of plundering indigenous peoples and raping various quasi-states around the world. Hell, we like being bigger than any of them other folks. Our guns are always cocked and locked. Kick ass and take names, yeah.
Of course, any good Christian knows that it all comes tumbling down when Christ makes his next visit. Sleep well, Mike. Meanwhile, I'm with Mary M.
Sources:
Among the lengthening lists are:
Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder, the Military in the New American Century, 2004, ISBN 1-932360-12-3.
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004, ISBN-10: 1-57675-301-8.
Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire, The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy, 2002, ISBN 0-674-00940-1.
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, How Americans are Seduced by War, 2005, ISBN-13: 978-0-19-517338-3.
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow, American's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, 2006, ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7891-9.
John Dinges, The Condor Years, How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, 2004, ISBN 1-56584-764-4.
John D. Cox, Climate Crash, Abrupt Climate Change and What It Means for Our Future, 2005, ISBN 0-309-09312-0.
Arron Wildavsky, But Is It True? A Citizen's Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues, 1995, ISBN 0-674-08922-7.
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak, The Impending World Oil Shortage (Revised), 2001, ISBN 0-691-09086-6.
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil, The View from Hubbert's Peak, 2005, ISBN-13; 978-0-8090-2956-3.
Raymond J. Learsy, Over A Barrel, Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel, 2006, ISBN 1-5955-5036-4.
James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency, Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, 2005, ISBN 0-87113-888-3.
Stephen Leeb (with Glen Strathy), The Coming Economic Collapse, How You Can Thrive When Oil Hits $2000 a barrel, 2006, ISBN-13: 978-0-446-57978-0.
Mike Palecek, Terror Nation, Notes from the Perimeter, 2006, ISBN 0-9774590-5-5.
And: Pick any Christian bible and look up The Revelation of John. (back)
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