President Harry Potter
President Harry Potter
President Bush today claimed there was nothing he could do to ease the pain Americans are feeling at the pump, saying, “I wish I could simply wave a magic wand and lower gas prices tomorrow.”
Perhaps instead of shrugging his shoulders and wishing for a magic wand, the president would be better served using the tools he does have, like the power of the presidency.
As a presidential candidate in 2000, for example, then-Gov. George W. Bush promised that, if elected, he would use the full weight of the White House to pressure oil-producing countries to increase production if there was a gas-price crisis. He charged, “The president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price” and promised that as president he would “convince them to open up the spigot to increase the supply.”
Flash forward to April 2004. Saudi Arabia led the fight within OPEC to cut production to keep prices high. But President Bush kept mum. He “refused to lean on the oil cartel” and refused to even “personally lobby OPEC leaders to change their minds.”
It doesn’t take mysterious powers of the supernatural to fight this battle. It just takes keeping your word.
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That’s why W makes the big bucks! We know now that for W every day is opposite day!
April 20th, 2005 at 2:53 pmHard-campaigning Bush promises things. Reality-bound President Bush has to ask Dick first:
…imagine a Dubya accent… Haliburton said wait until the 3rd quarter.
April 20th, 2005 at 3:01 pmW: (peevishly) Hey Dick, sorry to bother you. Can I call Saudi Arabia today?
DC: (sneering) No, dammit.
What most people don’t fully understand is that OPEC is virtually a royalty exchange. The largest percentage of the money goes into the financial pipelines of the drilling, pumping, piping, refining, shipping, more refining etc… All of these operations are owned by the big giant corporations through their dozens upon dozens of subsidiaries. A group of OPEC finance ministers sitting around adjusting the flow rates and price fixing are merely window trappings of a system that imbues US led multinational corporations with enormous profits. It maybe Saudi oil, but it doesn’t get here without US oil company controls. Bush is just another of the wholly owned subsidiaries.
April 20th, 2005 at 3:02 pmasshole – anone with half a brain knew that was bs when he uttered it.
April 20th, 2005 at 3:53 pmWhy would that chimp work to lower oil prices, when he’s in bed with oil industry. IMO it is clear to me that the powers that be are stealing every dime they can from every vault available in an effort to gear up for something big. They already stole the American surplus and then some, and now that they’re after SS, I cant help but wonder what they are up to.
April 20th, 2005 at 5:40 pmIt’s even worse than that. There will come a day (if we’re not already there) when the Saudis simply won’t be able to goose up production any more.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/
The only real answer is to burn as little gas as possible until a viable replacement exists. But SUV hogs refuse to believe this until it’s too late.
Once fossil fuels become too expensive, it’s too late. The time to develop alternative energy is when oil is plentiful. When we’re in a permanent oil crisis, then the NASCAR monkeys will wake up and say, “Gee, we better work on this!” But by then we won’t have the cheap energy required for R&D.
April 20th, 2005 at 5:47 pmThe solution is obviously efficiency, because production won’t rise faster than demand from now on.
April 20th, 2005 at 6:54 pmOPEC doesn’t set the prices, Wall Street does. Wall Street is not convinced the shooting has ended in the Middle East. Syria, Iran, Israel?
April 20th, 2005 at 8:40 pmIn the Great Midwest grumblings are rampant among the natives, even those bamboozeld by the Bush Propaganda Machine.
It’s pretty hard to come up with a soothing euphemism for price hikes when you’re spending your kid’s college money to fill the tank.
No doubt Frank Luntz will come up wth something — ‘compassionate conservation’ perhaps.
April 20th, 2005 at 8:47 pmThats how it starts, you ask him to keep his word on this, then you’ll be expecting him to keep his word on everything else. Then you’ll expect the other Republicans to keep their word too. Thats just absurd. The whole system would crumble if Republicans had to actually keep their word. Nice try though.
April 20th, 2005 at 9:16 pmIf the great brainwashed masses familiarized themselves with PNAC and Peak Oil theory, maybe they’d figure it out. I’m more convinced all the time that the single most obvious reason for the divide between those of us that know that the Bushies are corrupt and those that still support them is the INTERNET (and maybe a curious mind). Think about your typical wingnut Republican and where they get their information.
April 20th, 2005 at 10:29 pmFox TV, right-wing radio……
I love Harry Potter … Go George Bush!
April 21st, 2005 at 3:16 amIronically, it’s liberals in the cities who are generally hurting least from the Republican policy of gas-guzzling.
Maybe not ironic. We saw this coming, that’s why we voted for more efficiency. When we lost that vote, we prepared ourselves by buying smaller cars and using public transit when possible.
April 21st, 2005 at 4:58 pmYou watch Fox News and you’d think the problem is expensive environmental regulations.
Plus, Fox News has lots of good news on how we’re about to “turn a corner” in Iraq and in energy production.
Bush, pushing for ANWR oil exploration, noted that domestic energy production has been in decline for years. He’s betting the majority doesn’t know that domestic production peaked in 1970 and has been declining ever since. Opening Purdoe Bay in the late 1970s did nothing to reverse the trend. Worldwide per-capita energy production peaked in 1979.
April 21st, 2005 at 5:02 pmOf course, the shortage of oil is all good for the Petroleum Corprocrats — they can keep raising the prices, as they’ve been doing.
At some point, the lines on the graph meet and the ability of the American consumer to afford gas will intersect with the increasing price. At that point we will have reached the ‘big doom’ Hunter S. Thompson predicted. I just hope our country can survive.
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