And right-wing America thinks this is Biden's fault. They think it's all due to the fucking XL pipeline, because that's what Hannity tells them every single day.
Tell me why most of the World's oil and other resources are concentrated in totalitarian, fascists regimes like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others?
A close friend of mine is Nigerian. Nigeria was basically devoid of an economy until oil came along.
Oil drastically increased the income of most Nigerians, not all, and not all the same, but MOST benefitted.
My friend is typical, he is well educated, as are his children, and his great grandfather would be shocked at how well off he is economically.
For years, he avoided living in Nigeria because oil money attracted a series of corrupt governments. Today, he's living in Nigeria, and says it's getting better. Corruption is still rampant, but some leaders are making noise about ending the corruption.
What I see from the outside is slightly different. Nigeria no longer JUST sells oil. They have a small but growing non-oil economy. If you go around Africa, you find Nigerians consulting and investing, not entirely in oil.
The thing is, progress is slow. Nigerians aren't Brits or French or Americans, they are a largely tribal society with ancient and deeply rooted values unique to Nigeria. For a solution to work, it must embrace, rather than ignore or shun, local culture.
It's helped that Nigeria has sort of "owned" their corruption, as has the KSA. Once you own it, you can fix it. Venezuela has always the USA preventing them from finding a "Venezuelan solution", which isn't likely to be what works in the USA.
Russia is a special case, when they dumped Communism, neo-liberal criminals rushed in to commit arguably the largest and most spectacular grift in world history, even larger than the Spanish grift of South America.
Both Democrat and Republican senators and representatives over the last 50 years have allowed all our corporations, Oil & Gas, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and medical care systems, to become de-facto monopolies. Senator Sanders has tried to work within the Democratic Party so long and so many times; to little benefit. The US desperately needs a 3rd political party called CommonSenseUSA to gather almost 50 million independent voters with voters from both of the dinosaur parties so we can get something practical done that will benefit all of us. As long as we only have 'the same' politicians coming and going some of us simply don't vote for incumbents anymore. It's entirely believable that our +$4 gas prices and the entire Ukraninian game plan was indeed put in place by Mr. Trump in alliance with major executives from the Oil & Gas industry as the Reuters article suggest: https://www dot reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-trump-saudi-specialreport/special-report-trump-told-saudi-cut-oil-supply-or-lose-u-s-military-support-sources-idUSKBN22C1V4. Great research, thanks, Mr. Hartman.
Under our (in effect) two-party system where only the two big guys get to pass the goal post (with a few caucusing independents), third parties are a completely wasted vote, serving only to siphon votes from those who actually have a chance to win. Nobody has yet come up with a viable explanation to refute that sad fact of American politics.
But the Democratic Party is ripe for progressives to take it over from bottom up. It takes time and commitment, but that's how radical Christianists and white nationalists have commandeered what was purported to have once been a "grand" old party, but is certainly no longer. Liberals and progressives only have to reach out and grab the power that could change the country and the world for the better. Time is of the essence.
Since it's nearly impossible to amend the Constitution to give third parties a fair shot at seats in the halls of power, perhaps states, counties, and cities could adopt a ranked-choice voting system. If everyone adopted it, the big parties would probably split into their respective "liberal, moderate, and conservative" elements (whatever those labels might mean in real-life).
Trump did a quid pro quo with the Saudis about liquefied natural gas too. He traded arms that the Congress said they could not have, and in return, they bought LNG from the folks shipping it in the southern states. They have so much of their own natural gas in Saudi Arabia, it's as if they were buying sand. I contacted people in Congress. It seems they were busy trying to sort through what he had done in that Zelenskyy phone call. I was hoping they'd nail him for that arms deal at the same time. Poor Yemen, and now it's poor Ukraine.
It's all part of the Trump mo; create enough chaos, and they will never get to it all to prosecute in time. As for the lead pipe and beating people's heads, some of them took that literally and then to the Capitol. Chaos and pain---turns out that's Trump's AND the GOP's thing.
The oil industry and car manufacturers colluded to keep the guzzlers on the market. Don't think that's working anymore, so take heart next time you see an electric truck or Hummer. Costs about $9-$16 to fill those suckers up depending on whether you do it at home or commercially. Half as many parts, hardly any maintenance, and they go really fast, but sorry guys, they don't go vroom!
For those hating on Congress, 7% of them are quitting this cycle. I know you'd like more, but enjoy!
I can't sit silent while people lie and distort the effect Bernie Sanders has had on both parties. Do you watch what he says in interviews? No one needs to speak for him about his relationship with the Democrats. HE talks about it.
The biggest gift Thom has given us was the access we had to Bernie and a chance to hear him say out loud what we thought was true and possible. And, he told us to get to work, just like Thom.
If you think the Democrats and President Biden are not moving much of his agenda along, you are not LISTENING TO BERNIE.
Completely ignored by the media corporations is the role of Wall Street in greatly increasing oil prices. In the past the oil futures market participants were the major consumers like the airlines, and the major producers, the oil companies. Wall Street vulture capitalists realized that they could rake in billions in profits by getting joining in and speculating. When oil goes from $15 a barrel to more than $100 with a matter of days, it is the speculators that are driving prices up.
It has little or nothing to do with the actual supply and the actual demand. Consider that the U.S. only gets 3% of its oil from Russia and our government was happy under Trump to shut off oil from Iran and from Venezuela. This greatly increased the profits of Exxon and Chevron and the other oil companies. A portion of these excess profits go as kickback in the form of campaign contributions and other gifts to members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court which is why nothing is ever done.
Your details aren't correct, since US speculators operating in the US market don't have that much effect, but if you expand your view to the planet, similar schemes are implemented all over the globe, so your overall concept is right, just not the details.
While I certainly do not blame skyrocketing gasoline prices on Biden alone, me thinks thou doth protest too much regarding Trump's impact. Trump and Putin cannot be responsible for all the ills in our country Thom, just as Republicans were blaming Clinton and Obama years after their tenure for things they were not responsible for. This is largely more echo chamber cover for Democrats and if the diagnosis isn't right the treatment won't be either, although of course the point that we are too dependent on authoritarian leaders for our oil is irrefutable.
So, Biden is the blame for skyrocketing gas prices, but add "alone" for truthiness. Methinks thou doth offer no countervailing evidence to refute Trump's on-the-record impact. Strawman argument, whataboutism, false equivalency: Today's blog does NOT say Trump and Putin "are responsible for all the ills in our country"; Republicans constantly lying (present tense) about Clinton and Obama does NOT compare with Democrats telling the truth about Trump, Russia, Saudi Arabia, money, oil, and collusion (bigly) -- in fact, the entire sentence is a logical-fallacy deflection that avoids arguing the salient point on its merits. The only echo chamber here is Fux "News." But yeah, "we are too dependent on authoritarian leaders for our oil." (Only one out of six points is a misdiagnosis that requires a second opinion.)
The truth these days is very subjective. MSNBC and Thom Hartmann are indeed echo chambers. They mostly tell the truth about Republicans but will not do so about Democrats. Of course, the reverse is true of Fox News. Echo chambers serve not only to mislead but they lie by omission, ignoring Biden's myriad broken promises and his milktoast political expediency. Today Thom had a white woman on bemoaning observations that the Ukraine situation exposes political and media racism her and abroad as ridiculous and using words like "articulate" to describe the Europeans and "poor" and "uneducated" to describe the black and brown people. And Thom didn't say a thing. That is the echo chamber my friend, and it is lurching us to the right, creating boogeyman narratives for one side or the other to mock and hate. This is non-productive and I now find it alarming to listen to how Thom has joined the Democratic Party in their rightward trajectory and is more than happy to cover for them and ban criticism of Democrats in the interest of not "circling the wagons" while he bemoans the loss of democracy. This is treacherous territory and your distortion of my comments is evidence of the dearth of critical thinking in this country.
Methinks thou doth distort his own comments; I simply broke the sentences down into their right-wing talking points, i.e., logical fallacies. And this latest Fux "News" echo is similarly laced with Biden lies and hate, projections, deflections, false assumptions, false equivalencies, an anecdotal part-to-whole mischaracterization, and false accusation to boot. None of it sourced; none of it on topic; none of it true. Indeed, a dearth of critical thinking... in a Republican alternate universe on Earth II.
Thom is definitely NOT joining the Democratic Party move to neo-fascism. In fact, Thom is helping the progressives move the Democratic Party move back from neo-fascism to the center-right politics of most Americans, plus Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, et al.
The problem is instead of Pelosi and Schumer and the Democratic Party leadership LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE, they are digging in at the neo-fascist camp and forcing us to pick off their weakest gang members, when they could move WAY to the left, WAY WAY to the left, all the way to center-right, and have an 85% guaranteed vote every time.
The neo-fascist Democratic Party leadership doesn't want to become center right because they get more money from terrified Americans if they keep pretending the NaziRepublican Party is actual competition.
Via Senators Cramer, Cruz, and Sullivan, oil executives from Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp, Occidental Petroleum Corp and Continental Resources used Trump to get OPEC+ to cut output by ~10 million barrels/day by threatening to pass a bill which would move troops and defenses stationed in Saudi Arabia which "will be GREAT for the oil & gas industry!" Trump tweeted.
And it has been - Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP posted $174 billion profits in 2021 as a direct result of an increase in oil prices.
Now, that said it's not at all unusual for oil companies to ask politicians for favors. After all, Ted Cruz is just protecting his constituents biggest industry. But the oil industry, now that the president is a Democrat and has clean energy on the agenda, is just taking the profits as stock buybacks instead of investing in energy independence or clean energy. God forbid they spend some money cleaning up one of their many huge disasters.
First, nobody "produces" oil. They extract oil, it was produced millions of years ago and concentrated by time and geology. Take a look at oil extraction in the top ten oil selling companies, including the KSA. You will not find evidence that supports the claims of this article.
Having said that, the KSA almost certainly agreed to what TrumPutin demanded. They descend from nomads who lived in one of the harshest places on earth. They aren't stupid people. I have worked with many Saudis, and if you find them easy to out negotiate, count your change. These folks have been politically maneuvering for millennia.
This article is way off. The KSA doesn't control gasoline or oil prices. They can't. If they could, they wouldn't waste money buying people like TrumPutin.
I suggest you read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matt Simmons. To quote one fact from Matt's excellent book, every oilfield conference on enhanced oil recovery (EOC) since 1972 has been headlined by EOC experts from the KSA. If their oil was so easily gotten, they wouldn't know how to spell EOC. The fact is, their main oil field has been declining for 50 years. The last time I checked, which was maybe 10 years ago, the KSA were injecting 7 million BBLS a day of sea water into Ghawar, from thousands of former extraction wells, driving the remaining oil to a drastically reduced number of extraction wells.
It's not running dry, and the KSA have other reservoirs, but it's no longer 1930.
And right-wing America thinks this is Biden's fault. They think it's all due to the fucking XL pipeline, because that's what Hannity tells them every single day.
Tell me why most of the World's oil and other resources are concentrated in totalitarian, fascists regimes like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others?
Maybe because the wealth from resources attracts them and gives the winners the power to rule?
So we let the sociopathic fascists have everything 🤔
I'd rather we didn't, ,but that is what often happens :(
A close friend of mine is Nigerian. Nigeria was basically devoid of an economy until oil came along.
Oil drastically increased the income of most Nigerians, not all, and not all the same, but MOST benefitted.
My friend is typical, he is well educated, as are his children, and his great grandfather would be shocked at how well off he is economically.
For years, he avoided living in Nigeria because oil money attracted a series of corrupt governments. Today, he's living in Nigeria, and says it's getting better. Corruption is still rampant, but some leaders are making noise about ending the corruption.
What I see from the outside is slightly different. Nigeria no longer JUST sells oil. They have a small but growing non-oil economy. If you go around Africa, you find Nigerians consulting and investing, not entirely in oil.
The thing is, progress is slow. Nigerians aren't Brits or French or Americans, they are a largely tribal society with ancient and deeply rooted values unique to Nigeria. For a solution to work, it must embrace, rather than ignore or shun, local culture.
It's helped that Nigeria has sort of "owned" their corruption, as has the KSA. Once you own it, you can fix it. Venezuela has always the USA preventing them from finding a "Venezuelan solution", which isn't likely to be what works in the USA.
Russia is a special case, when they dumped Communism, neo-liberal criminals rushed in to commit arguably the largest and most spectacular grift in world history, even larger than the Spanish grift of South America.
You have it backwards, crime is attracted to easily stolen money
Yes, and we (in this case, the international community) let them have it (Why?)
Both Democrat and Republican senators and representatives over the last 50 years have allowed all our corporations, Oil & Gas, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and medical care systems, to become de-facto monopolies. Senator Sanders has tried to work within the Democratic Party so long and so many times; to little benefit. The US desperately needs a 3rd political party called CommonSenseUSA to gather almost 50 million independent voters with voters from both of the dinosaur parties so we can get something practical done that will benefit all of us. As long as we only have 'the same' politicians coming and going some of us simply don't vote for incumbents anymore. It's entirely believable that our +$4 gas prices and the entire Ukraninian game plan was indeed put in place by Mr. Trump in alliance with major executives from the Oil & Gas industry as the Reuters article suggest: https://www dot reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-trump-saudi-specialreport/special-report-trump-told-saudi-cut-oil-supply-or-lose-u-s-military-support-sources-idUSKBN22C1V4. Great research, thanks, Mr. Hartman.
Under our (in effect) two-party system where only the two big guys get to pass the goal post (with a few caucusing independents), third parties are a completely wasted vote, serving only to siphon votes from those who actually have a chance to win. Nobody has yet come up with a viable explanation to refute that sad fact of American politics.
But the Democratic Party is ripe for progressives to take it over from bottom up. It takes time and commitment, but that's how radical Christianists and white nationalists have commandeered what was purported to have once been a "grand" old party, but is certainly no longer. Liberals and progressives only have to reach out and grab the power that could change the country and the world for the better. Time is of the essence.
Since it's nearly impossible to amend the Constitution to give third parties a fair shot at seats in the halls of power, perhaps states, counties, and cities could adopt a ranked-choice voting system. If everyone adopted it, the big parties would probably split into their respective "liberal, moderate, and conservative" elements (whatever those labels might mean in real-life).
https://today.law.harvard.edu/ranked-choice-voting-explained/
Trump did a quid pro quo with the Saudis about liquefied natural gas too. He traded arms that the Congress said they could not have, and in return, they bought LNG from the folks shipping it in the southern states. They have so much of their own natural gas in Saudi Arabia, it's as if they were buying sand. I contacted people in Congress. It seems they were busy trying to sort through what he had done in that Zelenskyy phone call. I was hoping they'd nail him for that arms deal at the same time. Poor Yemen, and now it's poor Ukraine.
It's all part of the Trump mo; create enough chaos, and they will never get to it all to prosecute in time. As for the lead pipe and beating people's heads, some of them took that literally and then to the Capitol. Chaos and pain---turns out that's Trump's AND the GOP's thing.
The oil industry and car manufacturers colluded to keep the guzzlers on the market. Don't think that's working anymore, so take heart next time you see an electric truck or Hummer. Costs about $9-$16 to fill those suckers up depending on whether you do it at home or commercially. Half as many parts, hardly any maintenance, and they go really fast, but sorry guys, they don't go vroom!
🤣
For those hating on Congress, 7% of them are quitting this cycle. I know you'd like more, but enjoy!
I can't sit silent while people lie and distort the effect Bernie Sanders has had on both parties. Do you watch what he says in interviews? No one needs to speak for him about his relationship with the Democrats. HE talks about it.
The biggest gift Thom has given us was the access we had to Bernie and a chance to hear him say out loud what we thought was true and possible. And, he told us to get to work, just like Thom.
If you think the Democrats and President Biden are not moving much of his agenda along, you are not LISTENING TO BERNIE.
Completely ignored by the media corporations is the role of Wall Street in greatly increasing oil prices. In the past the oil futures market participants were the major consumers like the airlines, and the major producers, the oil companies. Wall Street vulture capitalists realized that they could rake in billions in profits by getting joining in and speculating. When oil goes from $15 a barrel to more than $100 with a matter of days, it is the speculators that are driving prices up.
It has little or nothing to do with the actual supply and the actual demand. Consider that the U.S. only gets 3% of its oil from Russia and our government was happy under Trump to shut off oil from Iran and from Venezuela. This greatly increased the profits of Exxon and Chevron and the other oil companies. A portion of these excess profits go as kickback in the form of campaign contributions and other gifts to members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court which is why nothing is ever done.
Your details aren't correct, since US speculators operating in the US market don't have that much effect, but if you expand your view to the planet, similar schemes are implemented all over the globe, so your overall concept is right, just not the details.
While I certainly do not blame skyrocketing gasoline prices on Biden alone, me thinks thou doth protest too much regarding Trump's impact. Trump and Putin cannot be responsible for all the ills in our country Thom, just as Republicans were blaming Clinton and Obama years after their tenure for things they were not responsible for. This is largely more echo chamber cover for Democrats and if the diagnosis isn't right the treatment won't be either, although of course the point that we are too dependent on authoritarian leaders for our oil is irrefutable.
So, Biden is the blame for skyrocketing gas prices, but add "alone" for truthiness. Methinks thou doth offer no countervailing evidence to refute Trump's on-the-record impact. Strawman argument, whataboutism, false equivalency: Today's blog does NOT say Trump and Putin "are responsible for all the ills in our country"; Republicans constantly lying (present tense) about Clinton and Obama does NOT compare with Democrats telling the truth about Trump, Russia, Saudi Arabia, money, oil, and collusion (bigly) -- in fact, the entire sentence is a logical-fallacy deflection that avoids arguing the salient point on its merits. The only echo chamber here is Fux "News." But yeah, "we are too dependent on authoritarian leaders for our oil." (Only one out of six points is a misdiagnosis that requires a second opinion.)
The truth these days is very subjective. MSNBC and Thom Hartmann are indeed echo chambers. They mostly tell the truth about Republicans but will not do so about Democrats. Of course, the reverse is true of Fox News. Echo chambers serve not only to mislead but they lie by omission, ignoring Biden's myriad broken promises and his milktoast political expediency. Today Thom had a white woman on bemoaning observations that the Ukraine situation exposes political and media racism her and abroad as ridiculous and using words like "articulate" to describe the Europeans and "poor" and "uneducated" to describe the black and brown people. And Thom didn't say a thing. That is the echo chamber my friend, and it is lurching us to the right, creating boogeyman narratives for one side or the other to mock and hate. This is non-productive and I now find it alarming to listen to how Thom has joined the Democratic Party in their rightward trajectory and is more than happy to cover for them and ban criticism of Democrats in the interest of not "circling the wagons" while he bemoans the loss of democracy. This is treacherous territory and your distortion of my comments is evidence of the dearth of critical thinking in this country.
Methinks thou doth distort his own comments; I simply broke the sentences down into their right-wing talking points, i.e., logical fallacies. And this latest Fux "News" echo is similarly laced with Biden lies and hate, projections, deflections, false assumptions, false equivalencies, an anecdotal part-to-whole mischaracterization, and false accusation to boot. None of it sourced; none of it on topic; none of it true. Indeed, a dearth of critical thinking... in a Republican alternate universe on Earth II.
Thom is definitely NOT joining the Democratic Party move to neo-fascism. In fact, Thom is helping the progressives move the Democratic Party move back from neo-fascism to the center-right politics of most Americans, plus Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, et al.
The problem is instead of Pelosi and Schumer and the Democratic Party leadership LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE, they are digging in at the neo-fascist camp and forcing us to pick off their weakest gang members, when they could move WAY to the left, WAY WAY to the left, all the way to center-right, and have an 85% guaranteed vote every time.
The neo-fascist Democratic Party leadership doesn't want to become center right because they get more money from terrified Americans if they keep pretending the NaziRepublican Party is actual competition.
The extra-thick Sharpie line draws itself:
Via Senators Cramer, Cruz, and Sullivan, oil executives from Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp, Occidental Petroleum Corp and Continental Resources used Trump to get OPEC+ to cut output by ~10 million barrels/day by threatening to pass a bill which would move troops and defenses stationed in Saudi Arabia which "will be GREAT for the oil & gas industry!" Trump tweeted.
And it has been - Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP posted $174 billion profits in 2021 as a direct result of an increase in oil prices.
Now, that said it's not at all unusual for oil companies to ask politicians for favors. After all, Ted Cruz is just protecting his constituents biggest industry. But the oil industry, now that the president is a Democrat and has clean energy on the agenda, is just taking the profits as stock buybacks instead of investing in energy independence or clean energy. God forbid they spend some money cleaning up one of their many huge disasters.
First, nobody "produces" oil. They extract oil, it was produced millions of years ago and concentrated by time and geology. Take a look at oil extraction in the top ten oil selling companies, including the KSA. You will not find evidence that supports the claims of this article.
Having said that, the KSA almost certainly agreed to what TrumPutin demanded. They descend from nomads who lived in one of the harshest places on earth. They aren't stupid people. I have worked with many Saudis, and if you find them easy to out negotiate, count your change. These folks have been politically maneuvering for millennia.
I can't post charts here, but go pull up https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/historical-oil-prices-chart/ and you will see that oil price is volatile over the short term but remarkably constant over the long term.
This article is way off. The KSA doesn't control gasoline or oil prices. They can't. If they could, they wouldn't waste money buying people like TrumPutin.
I suggest you read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matt Simmons. To quote one fact from Matt's excellent book, every oilfield conference on enhanced oil recovery (EOC) since 1972 has been headlined by EOC experts from the KSA. If their oil was so easily gotten, they wouldn't know how to spell EOC. The fact is, their main oil field has been declining for 50 years. The last time I checked, which was maybe 10 years ago, the KSA were injecting 7 million BBLS a day of sea water into Ghawar, from thousands of former extraction wells, driving the remaining oil to a drastically reduced number of extraction wells.
It's not running dry, and the KSA have other reservoirs, but it's no longer 1930.