I am so upset about Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante and the despicable bribe of Lisa Murkowski — tacking an oil drilling amendment in priceless Alaska wildlife preserve in exchange for her vote on a DEPLORABLE tax cut bill that includes among other things dismantling the ACA for all intents and purposes, I broke down and cried at the shrink today.
Then when I got over feeling sorry for myself I got mad. And I started to wonder, what would happen if we just nationalized the damn fossil fuel industry and took the profits for the American people? Because wtf. They are stealing OUR resources, destroying OUR land, air, water and environment and getting ung*dly rich doing it.
So? I decided to do a little research and lo and behold and come across this article in Business Insider proposing that exact thing! And, it mentions our current Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, no less — note this was written in 2011 so he was still head of EXXON, ie Biggest Thieves in the Known Universe Outside Of Russia.
I would like to report a crime.
Yesterday, $112M was stolen from US consumers. It will happen again today and probably tomorrow and that is on top of the $800 Million PER DAY that is being overcharged by oil companies in America alone, ACCORDING TO EXXON'S CEO.
That's right,Rex Tillerson himself just testified to Congressthat "based purely on supply and demand- should be in the $60 to $70 a barrel range." The reason it’s above $100 a barrel, Tillerson explained, is due to the oil majors using futures contracts to lock in current high prices, and speculation that is engineered by the high-frequency trading of quantitative hedge funds.
Other disclosures were made in last week's testimony that may interest you:
- The average cost of producing 1 barrel of oil was $11 (THAT IS ELEVEN, NOT A TYPO!); the average price of the oil in the marketplace–$92– some 8.5 times the cost of getting the oil out of the ground.
- The profits for the big 6 oil companies was $36 billion in the year’s first quarter. A large part of the $36 billion was used to buyback shares or pay dividends to shareholders.
- The deduction for intangible drilling expenses was given to the oil industry in 1960 when a barrel was worth about $15-17. So, why do they need this favor when oil is $100 a barrel?
Clearly there is no shortage of oil, the US has 1.75Bn barrels of oil in storage, enough to offset 186 days of imports (9.4Mbd) and 60% of those imports come from Canada and Mexico, not OPEC so our 1,750 MILLION barrels of storage would offset over 500 days worth of imports from the Middle East and Africa - even if it was TOTALLY cut off.
Note, these are not real-time price quotes, as the piece was written in 2011. But the idea is there, it’s clear. Oil profits are huge even if the price per barrel drops, but the environment is priceless and the people are being ripped off in more ways than one can calculate. This includes the repression of alternative fuel sources, like solar or even, if it can be improved, nuclear, that would be far less damaging. It includes the utter destruction of our planet.
It warps the geo-political landscape out of whack. The thirst for oil has probably in large part caused or exacerbated two world wars. It certainly aggravated any other causes that may have created these conflagrations at a bare minimum — but I think a strong argument can be made for pinning the tail squarely on the lust for resources and profits. Ideologies played a roll of course, and imperial designs, and various treaties — but since the industrial revolution one key resource rears its ugly head and that is oil, from the trenches of Europe to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, to the machinations in Iran and along the Silk Road, to conflict between Israel and the Arab Middle East/North Africa — all proxy wars between great powers and the industries that control them.
We see palace intrigue in Arabia — wars over pipelines from Turkmenistan and ports on the Black Sea; and clearly, now, we see connections between Rossneft in Russia and the very same Rex Tillerson of the Trump Adminstration.
So one could argue the fossil fuel industries have essentially been running this world for several hundred years, and I say enough is enough. The latest Republican/oil and mining assault on our national treasures is just too damn much.
We need to seriously consider sterner measures.
Cutting their corporate tax rate is exactly THE opposite direction we should be going. We’re getting ripped off and they’re getting obscenely rich and have always been obscenely powerful. And this class warfare is reaching truly epic and unsupportable dimensions. And now they want to exploit, pollute and destroy some of the most beautiful and priceless and irreplaceable, sacred and fragile regions of the world! And pay fewer taxes! And create huge deficits that will harm the people in a hundred different ways.
When is enough enough?
www.businessinsider.com/...