The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 43
conflicts. And we are forced to fund terrorist regimes who would like to see us
dead.
We willingly support an industry that has given us
mass murder billionaires. Every gallon of gasoline or
diesel fuel that we buy props up people like Hugo
Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein,
Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar Assad, Osama bin Laden,
the so-called Saudi royal family, and even Vladimir Photos for the post office
Putin. It doesn’t matter that three of these men are
now dead; the system will continue to churn out new monsters like a well-oiled
machine. Their wealth and power are directly derived from our use of gasoline,
whether we buy their respective oil or not. The oil and gasoline market is not an
open, supply and demand marketplace. It is a tightly closed, tightly controlled
fixed enterprise that doesn’t permit rogue competitors or independent action.
Boycotts or restrictions on the purchase of oil from an especially insidious dictatorship are an irrelevant weapon; to the point that even threatening such action is a joke. If we refuse to buy oil from Iran, for instance, we still have to buy
it from someplace. As we pull oil from the new source, a void gets opened that
must be filled. The Iranian oil fills that void, and another country (customer) who
doesn’t share our sense of moral outrage rushes in to buy the Iranian oil – at
the same global market price. The other trick that the oil producers use is to sell
and/or ship their oil to a middlemen country, such as Canada or India, where it
is re-labeled and invoiced, and sent to us. So, we the public, are the only ones
negatively affected.
When General Motors lost its way ninety years ago the United States lost its
economic and energy independence.
Notes on the story:
* My reason for calling Steven Rattner a “no-nothing” is best exemplified by the
criticism that he recently leveled at Mitt Romney, after Romney criticized the
GM bailout. Rattner said, “If Mr. Romney disagrees, he should come forward
with specific names of willing investors in place of empty rhetoric," Rattner
wrote. "I predict that he won't be able to, because there aren't any."
While I agree that there were probably no willing investors to bail out GM – they
would have had to be insane to do so – Rattner (Obama) should have forced
the oil industry to come to GM and Chrysler’s rescue. How would he have forced
them to do it? Simple, he would have said the following: “Either you provide the
funds or we withdraw our military and you have to provide your own protection
