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Published: Monday, October 02, 2006
What happened to $15 to
$30-per-barrel prime to end of August oil price gougers? VHeadline.com oil industry
commentarist Andrew McKillop writes: Plot and Counterplot? Is there a
root-and branch, motion picture type White House plot driving up oil prices,
while they were rising that is, to gouge and pillage the Average Innocent
Consumer ? Greg Palast supplies us chapter and verse: the
Bush Oil Gang, those inland, Midland oil pumpin and Bible thumpin boys got
their revenge on cheap oil. They got fistfuls of dollars from a low-down plot operated
with the 5 Evil Corporations (that is Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron and Total in
order of nastiness) to rack Mr. and Mrs. Average Owner of a wintertime fuel
burner or summertime Land Cruiser. In Iraq, that extra evil and ever tricky Dick Cheney,
owner of the Halliburton empire in the Empire, showed the Oil Gang how to
proceed. You just grab that Iraqi crude, whatever is still produced that is, you
either steal it or pay a generous US$7-per-barrel for it, then whip out of the
country for refining in friendly I-ran or further down the coast. Then you
re-import it, and rack world prices from the US Army for that wonderfuel
powering the US War Machine, to rave reviews in the financial press and plenty
of peer group envy. Imagination is Fine
Greg Palast lacks no
imagination. Not so long ago, he tells us, that pillar of the Evil 5,
former Anglo-Iranian now called BP faked up a corrosion event in its Prudhoe
Bay operations. Was it 400 000 barrels-per-day that was lost, almost forever, or
was it 200.000 bpd? This wasnt clear, and Greg didnt add that
Alaskan fields have been producing less for a whole long time, so expensive
maintenance on oversized installation is nowhere near so interesting to BP as
dreaming of becoming Iranian again, after Iran is liberated that is.
Greg didnt miss out on BPs bullseye timing, however. The
corrosion event came at just the right time, during the biggest recent uptick
in oil prices, helping push NYMEX crude to around 80 USD-per-barrel. The (Temporary) End of
Geopolitical Risk Premiums What happened to this famous $15 to 30-per-barrel prime to oil price gougers from the end of August? It disappeared along with Israeli F-16s over Beirut and lumbering, 25-year-old Israeli tanks firing shells at $5,000 USD, each, paid by US tax dollars, that US taxpayers didnt exactly like to see burned up so fast. Greg never asked if high-priced oil hampered Israels ardor and armor in its unequal fight with Evil Empire Hezbollah muftis and chaplains in the south Lebanon trenches. Maybe they did, maybe they didnt. In any case, and Greg underlines this, oil price gouging is all a plot because -- gasp! -- Peak Oil doesnt exist.
Curiously, but Greg is adamant about this shocking fact, the oil pumping feats of a certain Petromonarchy run by friends of the Bush family, which results in lower prices it is hoped and imagined, is part and parcel of the plot. Greg hints this could be extra sophisticated reasoning, akin almost to al-Kindis mental gymnastics, for example in his 940 AD tome The Gems of Wisdom. In other words, price gougers have to take their heavy feet off the pedal from time to time, to lure the addicts back on the hook. Plot within Plot The real plot is to keep Petro-Keynesianism on the rails, crunching along, on and up with cheap oil, which we can ad with a chuckle has a baseline price tag around $60-per-barrel these days. Greg Palast and likeminded, all-knowing oil experts help conjure away the logic problem of how we run a future car fleet of say 400 million in China, and 300 million cars in India, on oil reserves that stubbornly get lower. And lower. Greg doesnt waste readers time with algorithmic complexities like that: the reading public wants a plot, so it gets a plot! No Way Up but Up Only those with access to a Cray computer to work out their lottery ticket combinations or missile flight paths could calculate that geopolitical risk premiums disappeared this summer for the simple reason that only demand now drives prices. The supply side of the equation shows increasing signs of rigor mortis, so oil prices now trace the bulges and troughs of world consumption, and can go anywhere on the upside, with a little help from the Oil Gang, of course. They can then plunge faster than the Plunge Protection Team thinks possible, when the demand curve hits a temporary downside kink.
In his times, while setting up an office for Paul Wolfowitz and doing other fine things, Keynes imagined a fallback plan to keep the Growth Economy lurching forward. This was Plan B for Bottles, and would need enlightened administrators, unlike Wolfowitz. Burying bottles stuffed with high-denomination dollar bills, the new race of world economy managers would invite dynamic entreprenoors, as George calls them, to scrabble them up, in Midland Texas, even. These days, the bottles can be filled with high energy cost bio-ethanol, or turkey gut biodiesel to sharpen investor interest, or at least give the punters the fuel for a few extra miles cruising the highway to nowhere. Andrew McKillop http://www.vheadline.com/mckillop
Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM
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