From Sesame Street? I am going channel him as I write this and we’ll see how many left wing talking points Nancy Pelosi can squeeze into a single speech.
Ready? Here we go…
If you want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and therefore improve our national security situation, you can’t do it if you’re a Republican because you are too wedded to the oil companies (1). We have two oilmen in the white house (2). The logical follow-up from that is $3 a gallon gasoline. There is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect. How dare the President of the United States make a speech today in April, many, many, many months after the american people have had to undergo the cost of home heating oil. A woman told me she almost fainted when she received her home heating bill over this Winter (3) . And when so many people making the minimum wage (4), which hasn’t been raised in eight years (5), which has a very low purchasing power have to go out and buy gasoline at these prices? Where have you been, Mr. president (6)?
Six!Six! Six Talking PointsÂ
The middle class squeeze is on (7), competition in our country is affected by the price of energy and of oil and all of a sudden you take a trip outside of Washington (8) , see the fact that the public is outraged about this, come home and make a speech, let’s see that matched in your budget, let’s see that matched in your policy, let’s see that matched in and you’re separating yourselves yourself from your patron, big oil (9), cut yourself off from that anvil holding your party down and this country down, instead of coming to Washington and throwing your Republican colleagues under the wheels of the train, which they mightily deserve for being a rubber stamp (10) for your obscene, corrupt policy (11) of ripping off the american people (12).
Twelve! Twelve Leftist Talking Points!
Seriously though, Pelosi shows that she doesn’t even get it in her first sentence. If she really wanted to lower our dependence on foregin oil, she’d vote for domestic drilling, and not just in ANWR. The east coast, the west coast, the Gulf all have capped off wells. Our National Parks have known sources of both oil and natural gas. If we tapped those, while it may not knock our dependence down to zero, it would make one helluva dent.
But she is beholden to the environmentalist lobby, who demand that she vote against anything that would lower our dependence. The same goes for refineries. The same goes for new nuclear plants. The same goes for hydro plants. The same even goes for converting old coal fired plants into ultra-clean trash incinerators.
So who exactly is causing $3 a gallon gas? It ain’t Bush and it ain’t the oil companies.
Most of the MSM, which can be counted on to oversimplify ANY concept, have been saying the primary blame is on the Chinese and India for sucking up more oil.
I’d love to see the stats on that claim.
Why doesn’t someone have a website where you can see daily production stats (with a delay due to reporting) of oil from each exporting nation? This kind of data HAS to be available for the oil industry managers.
Then we could see who is holding up their end of the deal and who is just holding us up.
Since we get around 15% of our oil from Venezuala, I bet Commie Chavez has his hand on the valve as we speak, slowly cutting us off as much as he can.
Another thing I would like to see is a listing of countries who sell oil with long-term contracts for delivery as opposed to just filling a tanker and letting them charge what the market will bear when they get to port. As I understand the seaborne oil logistics system, this haphazard “spot market” pricing at delievery happens all the time, because the shipping barons (mostly Greeks) like to do it that way. Every other product besides petroleum is delivered by sea according to delivery charges, without regard to the value of the cargo.
For example, there was a two-week period recently where the spot price ran up from the mid 60’s to the mid 70’s. That means that the shipping barons made at least 13% on their oil while their slow ships were enroute over that period. The oil barons have actually been known to order their tanker captains to take a less direct route and/or slow down their ships in a rising market, so that there will be more profit at the destination.
The shipping barons made the windfall profit, not the oil companies. The oil companies were victimized by it. Perhaps our most effective solution would be to build more supertankers and run them under US flags, and go get our own oil. If we announced just a few builds, you can bet that the Greek barons would shit their pants. They might even have to revert to charging for shipping by delivery charge only, instead of leverage-buying the oil in the ship and selling it when they get here. Anything that reduced the short-term volatility in the spot market, or eliminated the spot market entirely would be a huge bonus to oil-importing nations.
There are individual gougers.
I will need a tankful of boat gas next week, as much as 120 gallons. That makes shopping around mandatory, so I’ve taken the time to chart which marinas have what price differential from street gas. The marina nearest to me, Rocky Point Marina, just raised their differential from 40 cents to 70 cents. That’s pure greed.
It’s tempting to shoot from the hip on this subject, but if you do a bit of digging instead, you will come up with villains you don’t hear mentioned on the MSM, and the ones you do hear about are usually revealed to be minor players.
I don’t think Comrade Chavez is playing around with the oil, at least not yet. He needs the money to keep his people happy. Without the oil money to basically buy off his people, he and his economy go in the shitter, and he knows it.
Also, given that oil is extremely fungible, if Chavez decides not to sell oil to us, we can just buy it somewhere else. And Chavez still has to sell the oil he’s not selling us to someone, or else he’s out that money, as I noted above.
I’ll bet if the Mexicans would stop being stupid about their nationalized and apparently quite decreipt oil industry, which they refuse to allow US oil companies to invest in, we could get a bunch more oil from them.
Venezuala is the major share holder and controls CITCO which processes most of the heavy crude that comes from Venezuala. The USA has most of the refining capability for this heavy crude and Chavez has no choice but to sell it here or not at all. He is all hat and no horse…
We can also chalk up the fact that we as a country haven’t built a refinery in about three decades, thanks to Pelosi and her ilk in the eco-freak community. Also, let’s discuss just how much the government has been meddling around with our gasoline (mandating MTBE, then de-mandating it and mandating ethanol) before we blame high oil prices on any companies.
I’ve been dealing with a section of the Attorney General’s office of the State of Georgia on a regulatory matter since last September. Our matter should have taken a month or so to complete, but there was a delay until recently because the AG was too busy prosecuting a seemingly endless list of gas station owners for “price gouging.”
The AG person I’ve been speaking to sighed to me at one point that what slowed up the process was that so many of the gas station owners and their attorneys didn’t speak fluent English. I managed to refrain from snorting on my keyboard at that one. More than likely, their English is flawless when they need it to be, but when a regulator calls, their accent gets reeal thick, and their hearing not so good….