Don’t Fear the Truth

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Awhile ago I had posted about how Saddam had started selling oil in Euros in November 2000, just a few months before Bush was inaugurated.

Watch the video. It is from 2004, it needs to be aired again on TV, now that people are paying more attention and not caught up so much in the 9/11 patriotic zeal.

Also interesting at the end of the video - a quote from Scott McClellan, backing the president.

Just to toss this in, here is another video, of a former CIA case officer, saying the evidence points to 9/11 being an inside job.

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He claims that Bush and Co. have deliberately caused this problem. Here are some key pieces from his article (which is long and detailed, and sometimes hard to follow)

• today’s oil prices are really determined is done by a process so opaque only a handful of major oil trading banks, such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, have any idea who is buying and who is selling oil futures or derivative contracts that set physical oil prices in this strange new world of “paper oil”.
• Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and gone to Wall Street
• a gaping loophole in US government regulation of oil derivatives trading so huge a herd of elephants could walk through it
• (A US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report states:) Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC [over the counter] electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes”.
• He also states the “Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator” is not doing its job - limiting trades to keep important commodities stable.
• Then, apparently to make sure the way was opened really wide to potential market oil price manipulation, in January 2006, the George W Bush administration’s CFTC permitted the ICE, the leading operator of electronic energy exchanges, to use its trading terminals in the United States for the trading of US crude oil futures on the ICE futures exchange in London - called “ICE Futures”.
• in January 2006, ICE Futures in London began trading a futures contract for WTI crude oil, a type of crude oil that is produced and delivered in the United States

Loopholes, seemingly minor changes, inaction by the CFTC, and finally Bush hammering the nail in the coffin. And the result is, according to Engdahl:

Is that not elegant? The US government energy futures regulator, CFTC, opened the way to the present unregulated and highly opaque oil futures speculation.

(Emphasis is mine)

And here is the real rub. Ready?

Lets move to this article from - amazingly - an environmental website. This site proposes that we do not need to drill in environmentally protected areas, because US oil and gas companies hold perpetual leases on Federal lands that they are not developing. It cites this House Natural Resources Staff Committee Report. The highlights of this report?

If we extrapolate from today’s production rates on federal land and waters, we can estimate that the 68 million acres of leased but currently inactive federal land and waters could produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.

That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75%. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third, and be more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

To me, this is explosive. The oil and gas they are talking about is on Federal land already leased to the oil and gas companies - NOT wildlife preserves or other environmentally protected areas. Yet why does Bush and the rest of the Republican parrots (sorry, I voted for Ron Paul, but most Republicans just parrots. *Squawk* Environmenalists are keeping us from ANWR *Squawk* Nuclear power will save us *Squawk*)

Anyway, why is ANWR all over the news, yet this report gets no press? Unfortunately, I do not think many people know. What is funny is that even the ANWR.org page pushes for more oil exploration! This made me chuckle: “there is a 95% chance that a ’super field’ with 500 million barrels would be discovered. DOI also estimates that there exists a mean of 3.5 billion barrels, and a 5% chance that a large Prudhoe Bay type discovery would be made.”

The US uses 21 million barrels of oil a day. 500 million barrels would last us… 24 days. 3.5 Billion would last us less than 6 months. The phrase ’super field’ sounds impressive though, doesn’t it?

Something is afoot. Why is everyone pushing to get into ANWR when there is six times the resources available right on land already set aside for gas prices? Why are these lands not developed if oil prices are supposedly due to lack of supply?

I don’t have the answer, but the results seem to benefit a Republican Oil Man, which Bush definitely is. The public is starting to push to drill in an environmentally protected area, Democrats are looking like the reason gas prices continue to rise (”Why won’t the democrats just let us drill in ANWR, Glenn Beck said it would solve the problem!!!”), and oil companies are reaping record breaking profits.

I doubt few people know now, or will ever know, the whole truth, but my month is on speculation causing the price increases. Too bad this won’t help me pay my heating bill this winter…

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I would say, the answer lies in our history - prohibition. This article explains it pretty clearly.

Prohibition was not repealed because the government suddenly realized that people should have the freedom to drink alcohol, or that the legal measures taken to keep people from drinking were ineffective, or even because social pressures finally swayed politicians to make changes that the public wanted.

The government needed more money. As the linked article states:

Prior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam’s annual revenue came from liquor taxes…By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam’s revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined.

The government didn’t need liquor tax revenue “once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell.”

Once the Great Depression hit, and didn’t appear to be ending anytime soon, the government needed revenue and so… Prohibition is repealed.

That being said, I would say Marijuana should be decriminalized. I would call myself a Libertarian, and I think the War on Drugs in crazy. In Ron Paul’s book ‘The Revolution, A Manifesto’ he cites evidence pointing to the criminalization of marijuana being racially motivated. He states that the ‘expert’ that testified (just one person) at the time admitted later that he had no evidence that marijuana was dangerous. The problem is that the government will make it completely legal, and then tax the shit out of it. 10 years after it is legalized, it will be more expensive than it is now, with a ton of the revenue from the sale of it going to make government budgets ever bigger.

The answer: decriminalize, but don’t legalize.

Disclaimer: Author has not smoked pot in 15 years, is completely out of the loop, and was never really much ‘in the loop’ at any point.

Most importantly though, beware politicians saying to legalize drugs. Are they realizing the War on Drugs didn’t work, or are they looking for future revenue?

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