I'm going to be lazy and just link to this must read by Sander's Research. This is incredible analysis. This takes the debate to a much higher plane.
... this was written by a friend of ours, a job foreman running a major electrical subcontract on a large construction site at the University of Michigan:
Dear SRA,
We knew it was coming and now it's here. Our gas is around two dollars a gallon and yesterday I ordered 25,000 feet of steel conduit, a drop in the bucket for this job, and was told that Detroit suppliers are out of conduit and hopefully they could fill my order next week. I was warned by two of our three major suppliers that steel would be rationed by summertime. Prices for the conduit have jumped one hundred percent in less than ninety days. What this means is that if I cannot get this one order within a week the company would have to lay off some employees. We go through a hundred thousand feet of conduit easily in two weeks with 75 men. My question to the suppliers is "where is the steel?" The answer I get is "Between China and rebuilding of Iraq" Copper is also in short supply and the price of scrap copper that we take to the scrap yards is over a dollar a pound. What's next? Will we bring construction in this country to a halt? Will U of M not have their Bio Science Research Building done by 2006? Ann Arbor's Local Electrical Union is one of the small pockets, if not the only pocket of work right now in the U.S. We have over a thousand men and women from out of state signing up to go to work here without a chance in a thousand of getting a job as our own people are not employed.
Yours,
Serious bottlenecks in strategic commodities are upon us, and the shipping industry cannot keep up with demand. Bottlenecks are bad enough, but the real crunch is coming in energy prices. As the charts accompanying this essay show, the price of every tradable form of fuel is skyrocketing. And the downstream impact of this is already being felt not just in the obvious forms of higher electricity prices, higher gasoline prices, and higher heating bills, but also in higher food prices. Food in the late industrial age is, after all, just reprocessed petroleum.
Evildoers in caves did not do this. Given that the world monetary system is a dollar monopoly, and that control of that monopoly has been ceded to a handful of financial institutions, given further that those institutions are the biggest financial contributors to the US political process, it is hard to avoid the obvious conclusion. One of the problems with having a monopoly on power is that when something goes wrong with that power, it is not very credible to blame it on someone else.
It is going to be a long war, if for no other reason than that we have been led into it by those who indeed are operating beyond the bounds of reason.
