Quote:Very simply, the United States has for over half a century pursued a foreign policy in the region geared toward maintaining the flow of oil out of the region at any cost — even at the cost of inflaming the irrational and psychopathic religious elements that have long existed in the region.

This is not to defend the barbaric elements who resort to violence and aggression as a means of expressing their disappointment with U.S. foreign policy. It is merely to recognise that you do not stir the hornet’s nest and then expect not to get stung.

And the sad thing is that stirring the hornet’s nest is totally avoidable. There is plenty of oil and energy capacity in the world beyond the middle east. The United States is misallocating capital by spending time, resources, energy and manpower on occupying the middle east and playing world policeman. Every dollar taken out of the economy by the IRS to be spent drone striking the middle east into the stone age is a dollar of lost productivity for the private market. It is a dollar of productivity that the market could have been spent increasing American energy capacity and energy infrastructure in the United States — whether that is in oil, natural gas, solar, wind or hydroelectric.

And this effect can spiral; every dollar spent on arming and training bin Laden and his allies to fight the Soviet Union begot many more thousands of dollars of military spending when bin Laden’s mercenaries turned their firepower onto the United States, and the United States chose to spend over ten years and counting occupying Afghanistan (rightly known as the graveyard of empires). It is likely that the current uprisings will trigger even more U.S. interventionism in the region (indeed it already has as marines have already been dispatched to Yemen) costing billions or even trillions of dollars more money (especially if an invasion of Iran is the ultimate outcome). This in turn is likely to trigger even fiercer resistance to America from the Islamist elements, and so the spiral continues on.

The only way out of this money-sucking, resource-sucking, life-sucking trap that is very literally obliterating the American empire is to swallow pride and get out of the middle east, to stop misallocating American resources and productivity on unwinnable wars.

http://azizonomics.com/2012/09/14/this-is-blowback/

This.

Excellent post. I heard somewhere that the real cost of a gallon of gas is $15.

http://www.progress.org/gasoline.htm

I would like to follow T. Boone Pickens plan to switch fleet vehicles to natural gas.

http://www.pickensplan.com/

Valid

(09-15-2012 08:56 AM)firmbizzle Wrote:  Excellent post. I heard somewhere that the real cost of a gallon of gas is $15.
http://www.progress.org/gasoline.htm
I would like to follow T. Boone Pickens plan to switch fleet vehicles to natural gas.
http://www.pickensplan.com/

We use 19 million barrels of oil a day. We produce 7.5 million, and get another 1 million from corn ethanol. We import about 9.5 million. That gets us to 18 million and the last million is something called "refinery gain" (we get more volume out of the refinery in refined products than the volume of oil we put in to produce it, due to the laws of physics regarding mixing).

Fleets to natural gas and railroads to electric saves us 3 million barrels of oil a day. Use nuke, wind, solar, and natural gas to generate the additional electricity.
Sugar cane ethanol from Latin America and West Africa saves another 2 million barrels a day.
Drill here, drill now, gets us another 2 million barrels a day.
A million electric cars on the road saves us 100,000 barrels a day.

That cuts our oil imports from 9.5 million barrels a day to 2.5 million barrels a day. That means we don't need to import beyond NAFTA (better if we do the Canada pipeline). We could live with that.