The Lie of Limited Supply : The GOP Land Grab Is ON

U.S. Oil Supplies Are Higher Today Than at Any Time During the 90's

Yesterday the Senate failed to advance the Stop Excessive Energy Speculation Act (S3268), a bill which would have eliminated excessive speculation by changing the definition of “legitimate hedge trading” to include only those producers and purchasers of actual physical energy commodities, and places limits on trading by those who are not trading actual physical petroleum products."

The vote was 50-43, 10 votes shy of the 60 necessary to invoke cloture, end debate, and get some real oil/gas price relief underway. The vote fell along party lines--with Democrats voting to restore sanity to an out of control market by reigning in speculation and Republicans voting to keep the lie of limited supply going and the hope big oil has (and has had since 1980) for a land grab alive.

Given the choice to make what many experts believe would be an almost immediate and drastic difference (up to 60% reduction) in the price of oi and gasoline, the Republicans chose instead to side with big oil and speculators and against closing what is the real culprit behind crippling energy prices--the "Enron Loophole."

Their plan? Lie and hope no one with bothers to check the facts. Hope that no one fires up their browser and checks out the Bush Administration's own Energy Information Administration figures. Hope against hope that if a person does check those numbers that they don't graph them and put the visual kibosh on GOP LIES by posting such graph of the data on their blog. See the pretty bar graph at the end of this post?. Oops... (got a plan B boys?).

They are betting that they, along with help from the Bushed Administration, can pull the wool over the American public's eyes and get environmentally protected areas opened to exploitation by oil companies for what amounts to what even John McCave-in admits will be nothing more than a short term psychological effect on a financially pained American psyche.

For those unfamiliar with the "Enron Loophole", the following short clip (from the must see documentary film Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room) should prove equal parts enlightening and infuriating. Energy traders laughed about steeling money "from those poor fucking grandmothers" then, and they are doing it again today (as Ben Stein has pointed out). The the Right refused to protect Americans then, and it's doing it again now. The arguments being made now on behalf of drilling will one day look as preposterous as Cheney's defense of Enron back then.

"The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things: an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they're trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of issues. They've [Californians] obviously created major problems for themselves." —Vice-President Dick Cheney, May 17, 2001, on PBS's Frontline



The Lie and The Lang Grab:

Republicans, and those in the Energy and Financial industries, say that increased demand and decreased supply are at the core of high oil and gas prices. LIES. This disingenuous rallying cry of Republicans (soulless oil and financial industry shills that they are) has found resonance with the same uncritical masses on the right who swallow whatever poisonous pablum the right shoves in their mouths. Talk Radio tools and Fox News satisfy their need to be told what to think rather than actually having to think for themselves.

The short supply LIES being shamelessly put forward by the GOP are destructive and craven, and the people who can't find Iraq on a map are eating them up.

Some have even been duped into signing petitions demanding we "Drill Now!" The whole thing would be laughable if the situation weren't so serious. There is almost universal expert agreement that opening environmentally sensitive protected areas to drilling will never have any significant effect on the prices of either gas or oil and would provide only a very short term fix (12-32 years of oil at the low and high estimates) for what is a very long term energy, environmental, National Security problem.

With an economy on the ropes, stagflation in full effect, Republicans are bent on using the glint of fools gold to distract the American public from getting behind any effective redress of high oil prices or any a real plan for energy independence. The Gas and Oil industry have long sought access to Anwar and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), and the GOP plans to do whatever it takes to give their corporate masters what they want (and what their lobbyists have paid handsomely for).



The Right has absolutely no shame in using the crisis (which they created (thanks Dr. Phil) via deregulation) of high gas prices to create a ginned up rationale for drilling, and to use that false argument not only to give Exxon what it wants on a platter but also as subterfuge to kill the re-regulation necessary to avoid this speculation fueled crisis in the future. No, given enough cover, GOP Congressional lackeys will continue their attempt make the land grab before the American public wises up.

In what may only be sadly described as a a yet another low in a long pattern of lows, the Bush administration's farce of an energy secretary, Sam Bodman, is joining in the misinformation effort by making false statements himself to bolster the GOP's completely manufactured case:

"Market fundamentals show us that production has not kept pace with growing demand for oil, resulting in increasing prices and increasingly volatile prices. There is no evidence that we can find that speculators are driving futures prices for oil." —Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman, June 21, 2008, on MSNBC



The truth, of course, is that Oil Prices are almost exclusively the result of speculation. Just listen to what that left wing bastion of tree huggers over at BusinessWeek has to say on the matter:

On January of this year, the U.S. used 4% less petroleum than we did a year ago. (Oil demand was down 3.2% in February.) Furthermore, demand has been falling slowly since July of last year. Ronald Bailey of Reason Online has pointed out that worldwide production of oil has risen 2.5% in the first quarter, while worldwide demand has grown by only 2%.


The information presented below has been taken directly from that radical far far left bastion of statistical insanity, the Bush Administration's own Energy information Administration. It should be apparent to all but the legally blind (I'm working on a braille version) that Domestic Oil supplies, far from decreasing, have actually increased during the Bush administration and in large part mirror the upward arc Oil Company Profits have taken during the same period.

In short, THE TRUTH is that Domestic oil on hand is higher today than it was when Bush took office, and significantly higher since 2004 than at any time during the previous 13 years.



Believe your eyes (and the government's own data) and reject the Republican hype. Don't let the Republicans use the fuel cost crisis that they created to grab the land their Big Oil benefactors have been after for decades. They're in it for the money, not America's long term best interests, and they're betting you won't bother to check the facts. Don't let them twist the facts surrounding this crisis in order bypass critical thought and put into action drilling plans long on the books of Big Oil backers.

But hey, it's not like Republicans would ever use a crisis to get what they wanted all along? Is it?

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