Republicans Blame Democrats for 'A Nation of $4 Gasoline'

reply to post by mybigunit


Great post..
I had the time today to watch zeitgeist... And anyway..
As the film points out, money used to be redeemable for gold (which means that a dollar bill could be redeemed for gold coins worth the same amount). That was a huge insurance policy. The dollar bills even had, written on them at the bottom, that it was redeemable for gold.

These days our currency is not worth the paper it is printed on. It is not redeemable for gold as we have all become pawns in the global conspiracy of the central bank and the federal reserve. I'm starting to wonder if this downtroden economic downturn is deliberately being put in place by the oil companies, the speculators, and the men "behind the curtain" in order to economically justify what will soon become the North American Union (which money will, of coarse, be the Amero which we have heard so much about). Perhaps the entire reason for the high price of oil, for example, is to facilitate a justification for other countries coming to our "rescue" so to speak which will then put the people's faith in this North American Union to be to our benefit (and our families' benefit) when all they are really doing is trying to form a one world government that oversees everything and polices everybody.

If you have not watched zeitgeist, go to youtube and watch the 13 part movie. There is so much that the average person just does not know but needs to. Especially now. The movie brings things into perspective about religion, economics, 9/11, and the war. The religion piece was the most interesting to me, but I have always been anti-religion anyway.

-ChriS



[edit on 12-6-2008 by BlasteR]

I also thought it prudent to point out this clip from the daily show lastnight..

www.thedailyshow.com...

President Bush sais "I haven't heard about that" when asked about what he thinks about economic experts foreseeing 4 dollar a gallon gasoline. Why is this president constantly a fumbling idiot? It's no wonder our government isn't here for us. We have a gas price crisis and our own president has no idea what anyone is talking about with regard to fuel prices.

I believe that Bush himself has been being played as a pawn for these 8 long years. Everyone else does the work for him and this is proof of that.

-ChriS

reply to post by grover

Originally posted by grover
Our refineries are presently functioning at about 80% capacity... if they were functioning at 100% capacity which they are certainly capable then there wouldn't be this crisis, there would be enough oil in the American market to keep pricesdown.

So now tell me are those refineries run by Democrats? No. So whose fault is it?

And they are getting old, and require periodic maintenance, and every time one of them goes down for whatever reason it puts an undue strain on the others to pick up the slack. Look at what Katrina did.

grover, sooner or later you are going to have to admit that your liberal tree-hugging me-first attitude is hurting the rest of America. We all have to work together and make sacrifices. Drilling in the Dakotas isn't going to hurt you one bit. Neither are new refineries or more nuclear plants or modern coal energy plants.

I am all for increasing production in ANWR and elsewhere in the U.S.

But even if we were to decide now to drill in ANWR, for example, it could take ten years or more for the oil to start flowing. And what are we going to do in the meantime? Pretty much nothing but watch the prices skyrocket and pay the extra money since we are all dependant on gasoline. IMO, that is the true problem here. The fuel prices are one thing, but our dependance on oil and gasoline is not going to change unless the technology changes. That is a MASSIVE underataking and supposedly no viable alternative has been discovered just yet.

Finding places to drill in the U.S. would increase our production, but then how much would the oil companies export for large profits? Especially given the skyrocketing global energy output and fuel consumption. The idea is to make the prices go down, but that would mean the oil companies would have to play their part.

Drilling is only a short-term partial solution to high gas prices. But it does nothing to purge the real problem which is our dependance on oil and gasoline. Our dependance will only be wained by technology.

Then you have alternative energy companies that are going to somehow have to compete with the big record-profit-making oil companies which are increasingly rich in an otherwise lulled economic situation. That means that any new companies selling alternative energy products and services is going to be hard pressed to spend millions of dollars to reach out to consumers, produce and deploy a viable alternative to gasoline, and all the while hope that this economic downturn doesn't destroy their brand new baby company.

There is no quick solution. Any alternative is going to take time and even the temporary fixes like increasing oil production in the U.S. is not going to have any effect on oil prices for years. The hope of any alternative energy movement gaining foothold is constantly undermined by the falling dollar and the ever-increasing record cost of oil which are, in essence, slowly bleeding our economy out.
This situation shows our true weaknesses regardless of who is responsible. Anyone can look back and say he or she is responsible, but we need to move forward now if we are going to get through this and have an economy that is worth anything in 10-20 years.

This downtroden economic situation also shows how dependant we are on global trade in the big global economic scheme of things. These problems are all amplified by oil prices. We buy so much imported crap from other countries. Those products are then price-hiked due to increased costs of producing those products, and again price-hiked due to transportation costs and oil prices. We really need to start being more self-sufficient in the global economy. I'm not saying we should turn into South Korea or anything, but there are so many steps we can take now to prepare ourselves economically that just aren't even being considered right now.

3 months ago the republicans were telling us not to worry and that everything would be O.K.. people like Rush Limbaugh.. But this situation is continuing to degrade despite such basless reassurance. People like Rush Limbaugh shouldn't insult our intelligence by telling us that oil prices are eventually going to go down. We all know that is economics 101/basic supply and demand. The problem is long-term trends, not the fall of oil prices in the near-term. There are so many factors that determine oil prices and none of those are getting much better, nor are they projected to. The near-term may here and there show slight decreases in gas prices, but the long-term trend looks pretty scary. We deserve to be nervous!

-ChriS

I highly recommend all watch this part of zeitgeist about the federal reserve. Thanks.



-ChriS

reply to post by Electricneo

The oil companies are making record profits and they are using them to
buy pundits on TV like Glenn Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly.

Right on man! Those evil right-wingers should follow this TV pundits example:

"There's no question in my mind that OPEC and the oil companies are gouging us simply because they can! 2005

"Unresolved problem" segment tonight, profiteering during a time of war. Most of you know I believe the big oil companies led by Exxon are doing just that. 2006

I'd name the names of greedy oil company CEOs who are making tens of millions of dollars while working folks suffer. 2008

The above quotes were made by Bill O'Reilly!

Instead of accusing fellow ATS posters of being "brainwashed by the corporate media" and calling them a ''major loser'' and ''a low life media retard'', maybe you should get some basic facts straight first.

reply to post by Boone 870


Star for you, Boone 870. Good work illustrating just who is misinformed and brainwashed in this society. It's so fashionable to just blast Fox News because all the libs are doing it, but a deeper look shows quite another side of the coin.

reply to post by jsobecky


While many folks appear to be hung up on this finger pointing thing between dems and rep's, and other straw men arguments, you might want to check out this article: www.star-telegram.com...

In several decades only one filing for a permit to build a new refinery...tens of thousands of permits to drill on millions of acres of public land...runing refineries under capacity... Between that and the deregulated market that has led to this huge speculation price runup, we are getting the bad end of the screw job here...

[edit on 12-6-2008 by skyshow]

reply to post by Boone 870


Hah, apparently you don't understand when someone's blowing smoke up
your extremely tight anal sphincter.

Of course O'Reilly has to pay lip service to the oil crisis otherwise it would
be too obvious. But does he write a book about it? No
All his books are brainwashing propaganda about his delusion of culture wars.

Out of the 3 blowhard morons I mentioned O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck -
O'Reilly does occasionally backtrack and eat crow but he still helped get us into Iraq.
And he still continues to destroy Jeffersonian America with his ignorance.
He also spent 4 years bashing Clinton for a BJ when he could have been
after our real enemies like Bin Laden. He's a derelict of his duties like
anyone who falls for his McCarthyist jingoism.

I just posted this in the other angry gas forum, but here is a thread I did a couple months ago that highlights some points here... not to cut and paste, but since I am accused of not sighting sources, here are some....

Oil Companies; Political Patsies or Greedy Fat-cats?

I have recently noticed the building anger towards the oil companies and their ridiculous profits...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Well this got me thinking, and bear with me, because I believe this is my first researched thread, and I want to get my point across.

Americans use a huge amount of gas every day....

it shows that the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil each day. If you look at the statistics on a page like this one, you find that a barrel of oil (which contains 42 gallons or 159 liters) will yield something like 19 or 20 gallons (75 liters) of gasoline, depending on the refinery. Therefore, in the United States, something like 400 million gallons (1.51 billion liters) of gasoline gets consumed every day.



auto.howstuffworks.com...

And profits for the last quarter were 11 Billion for one company alone.(EXXON MOBIL)
In total, there were over 120 BILLION dollars in profit by oil companies last year. So why am I calling the oil companies "Patsies"?
For one, Exxon paid over 40% of it's profits to taxes. They were the largest payers of taxes in U.S. history.
seekingalpha.com...

If you were to do the math, the oil companies make less than 1 dollar per gallon of gas, being as I cannot get the figures for overseas fuel sales by these American Companies. So not to be liberal with the math or anything, but how much profit should be taken from the very corporations who we all have stock in?


Conclusion: In other words, just one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers, which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% is only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion), and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes).



By comparison, grocery stores RAKE in the profits on a Gallon of milk, and yet there is no uproar at the direct gouging done by those camps...

At one point in 2003, the profits that retailers earned for everygallon of milk equaled the wholesale amount farmers were paid
per gallon, Cotterill said in a report he issued on milk prices last year.


www.fmpc.uconn.edu...

So what is my point? The company that pays more taxes than the lower half of wage earners combined, is also contributing 90% of it's profits to the various mutual funds that we all own, and has raised prices 25% when costs have risen 120% for it's product.
www.eia.doe.gov...

Read the data, and if you compensate for current prices for crude, you will see that there really should be MUCH HIGHER prices for fuel right now. If it was not for our low gas taxes, there would be much more to complain about.

So what's the conspiracy? Are we deliberately being maligned so that we begin to loathe the middle east and seek some war "spoils"? With ethanol costing more than twice the cost of regular fuel, (it takes a gallon of fuel to create a gallon of ethanol) and considering it uses the same amount of corn per gallon that a human eats in an ENTIRE year, are we being pushed to create the conditions for a complete destruction of the oil producing nations, and a famine for the rest of the world that we don't want to support anymore?
I am not rich, actually fairly poor, and I drive a gas guzzler, so please avoid the bias argument. Thanks, and please be gentle....


That was here; www.abovetopsecret.com...

Thanks, Jason (sorry to paste, but I thought it relevant, and no one viewed that thread anyway...)

[edit on 12-6-2008 by jasonjnelson]

I'd LOVE to pay $4 a gallon of fuel so I don't know what you guys are all moaning about blaming your liberals and democrats. Try living over here in the UK where its about $10 a gallon. Currently today its £1.20 a litre so that works out at $2.29 a litre theres roughly 4 litres to a gallon that makes it about 10 Dollars, so stop moaning and enjoy stockpiling as its going to go up anyway.
They have to pay for the wars with oil producing countries they start somehow.
I cant cant wait till the world starts to run out then the US will find a way to start a War with the UK to grab our North Sea reserves.

I hope the oil prices continue to rise...and I have to agree that there's much more factoring in to the reason we have high gas prices...so no...it's not just the Democrats. I hope we get to $5 dollars a gallon by the end of the summer

reply to post by jasonjnelson


you are comparing gasoline and record oil profits for the oil companies to grocery stores selling milk. Then you want us to feel sorry for them raking in record profits and thus paying "record taxes"? I noticed you failed to blog about the record subsidies that the govn't gives the oil companies...given that and the massively inflated gas prices at the pump as a result of out of control and deregulated future speculators, what else are we to conclude given those who continue to support the Republicans and the Bush administration? They must be supporting the GOP, be brainwashed by Rush and the rest of them, or not coming to class prepared!

[edit on 13-6-2008 by skyshow]

reply to post by skyshow


I'll never get over how often you resort to calling me stupid.

That and the fact that the mods never seem to call you on it.

But thank you for commenting on absolutely nothing, and adding even less to the conversation.



[edit on 13-6-2008 by jasonjnelson]

reply to post by jasonjnelson


Even if we don't agree on ideology, we learn from one another, and so thank you, thank you even if we don't agree because it gets us all thinking. Ideology should be based on factual information, if it's not factual, one has to adjust the ideology.



[edit on 13-6-2008 by skyshow]

Originally posted by jsobecky
grover, sooner or later you are going to have to admit that your liberal tree-hugging me-first attitude is hurting the rest of America. We all have to work together and make sacrifices. Drilling in the Dakotas isn't going to hurt you one bit. Neither are new refineries or more nuclear plants or modern coal energy plants.

I have never once hugged a tree though I once maintained that moss was mother earth's pubic hair.

I am not a NIMBY either. I am an environmentalist because I understand that if we don't take care of the environment we are screwed.

Coal pollutes the air and is a major source of greenhouse gasses and as for nuclear... can you spell Chernobyl? When the waste of something is deadly toxic for 10's of thousands of years we'd damn well be careful... extremely careful about it and from what I have seen I have no faith in companies maintaining or storing or operating their plants with the safety of rest of us in mind.

As for oil let me say this... we could approve of every single demand of the oil companies and it still would not ease the current crisis... it would take years for those wells or refineries to come on line.

The other part of the equation is this... we have got to start developing alternative resources the day before yesterday and the longer we go on drilling eating up more and more oil, the longer industry will put off doing somethng meaningful in the way of developing alternatives.

Nothing will change unless the consumer demands it. Further drilling while necessary (I am not opposed to industry BTW) to focus on just that is just a distraction... We need to be doing something now.

reply to post by Electricneo

Hah, apparently you don't understand when someone's blowing smoke up
your extremely tight anal sphincter.

Well, I certainly caught you.

Of course O'Reilly has to pay lip service to the oil crisis otherwise it would
be too obvious.

I'm confused. You stated earlier that the oil companies were using their record profits to buy TV pundits like O'Reilly, now you're claiming that they buy TV pundits like O'Reilly to repeatedly slam big oil, their profits, and their executives?

But does he write a book about it? No
All his books are brainwashing propaganda about his delusion of culture wars.

I wouldn't know. I haven't read any of his books so you will have to tell me if he writes about big oil since you seem to be the expert on Bill O'Reilly.

Out of the 3 blowhard morons I mentioned O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck -
O'Reilly does occasionally backtrack and eat crow but he still helped get us into Iraq.

There is no need to change the subject.

And he still continues to destroy Jeffersonian America with his ignorance.
He also spent 4 years bashing Clinton for a BJ when he could have been
after our real enemies like Bin Laden. He's a derelict of his duties like
anyone who falls for his McCarthyist jingoism.

That sure is fresh.

You're blaming the terrorist attacks on O'Reilly because he was bashing Clinton about a BJ. Do you blame Clinton for the terrorist attacks because he was busy getting a BJ?

reply to post by BlasteR


BlasteR !!! Thanks for that Daily Show link!!! No satellite TV for us for the last three days, I'm getting all of my laughs from the internet now!!!!

Why would anyone seriously cite bill o really on anything? Its like citing mush loosebowels, ann coulter or michael savage... none of them have a shred of credibility.

reply to post by Sublime620


Supply is low, demand is high, particularly from the growing economies of India and China, which is gearing up for the Beijing Olympics. The costs of exploration have doubled in the past three years, continuing geopolitical tensions in oil-producing regions are proving detrimental PLUS when oil facilities in Iran or Iraq are damaged, people get concerned about the fuel supply and, hey presto, the price rises.