Monday, September 02, 2013

oil, and the earth, part 2




All politics is about money when it's boiled down, and all money eventually connects with oil in this industrialized, homogenized, and sodomized world of ours.

"Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concerned," Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his final book, "A Man Without a Country" in 2005. "What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet--the only one in the whole Milky Way--with a century of transportation whoopee. Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it?

"Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high!

"You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor's dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens. Hey, as long as we are stuck with being homo sapiens, why mess around? Let's wreck the whole joint. Anybody got an atomic bomb? Who doesn't have an atomic bomb these days?"

The world runs on oil. Can there be any doubt? It's the blood in the veins of the soulless monster Moloch, the gigantic and irresistable industrial robot that lurches across the face of the earth, scattering blessings and poisoning all life.

Keeping Vonnegut's background facts in mind, let's take a look at blogger/genius Jim Willy's take on impending US military action in Syria, a desperate and inadequate attempt to stop the new and increasing dominance of oil and gas pipeline politics in the Middle East and Europe, the rise also of the Gas Cooperatives and the dominance of the Russian state oil company Gazprom passing OPEC in importance,  the fall of the House of Ibn Saud, and catastrophic changes for the US in global commerce and, especially, banking.
  
"Mama, tain't long fo day," sang Wiilie McTell, and a new day is dawning in the US of A, where the banking system continues stumbling along in limbo, pretending to be solvent, since the Lehman Brothers was sucked into the void in 2007. The crisis became acute in 2011 with the implementation of a more or less permanent bond purchasing program called QE3, making clear that the meltdown is permanent and insoluble, and anyway there's been no attempt to actually solve it.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, nothing has changed in the last year except the lives of a few thousand people which ended prematurely. Sectarian, civil war continues in Iraq, and Syria demonstrates the region's three way struggle between entrenched and corrupted dictatorships, democratic oriented people, and religious fundamentalists, who manifest in Sunni regions as al Qaida.

Syria is the crossroads for us, and from here on out we're screwed. The region is in such a chaos of destructive turmoil that more regimes are going to fall, not just the smirking twerp Assad. (Footnote). The discovery and wholesale exploiting of oil in the region has been unmitigated disaster for the entire world, and most especially for the countries it comes from.

And now, the superpowers have taken sides in Syria, are lined up like they were in the Balkans before WWI, and all it would take would be a match.

If you haven't noticed yet, all of these things are totally off the corporate media's radar screens. And for good reason. At this very moment, Russia, in concert with the Iranians and China, is planning to displace the petrodollar, because it is based on increasingly shaky Treasury bonds, and creating huge global banking crises, which has sabotaged some countries' currencies, and threatens to screw up all international transaction.

Putin and his allies plan to mount a campaign to replace the petrodollar with a gold based oil trade backed by the reliability of a pipeline delivery system originating in Iran and beyond (Iraq).  It would make Russia the predominant superpower by collapsing the dollar and bond market, pushing a wedge between the US and Europe, and creating a dominant partnership between oil rich Russia and their dependent allies, the Chinese.

My takeaways from all this are pretty negative. Politicians the world over seem concerned only with their own power, and the fate of the earth can go to hell. Putin and Russia are in the driver's seat right now, so "transportation whoopee" will continue, at least as long as Russia's got oil and gas. The serious problems of the survival of life on earth will not be addressed, but the serious business of determining who's top dog will. And the top dog isn't the US any more, since our day has departed. 


Footnote: According to Kurt Vonnegut, a twerp is a guy who shoves a set of dentures up his ass and then goes around biting the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs.

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