The manufactured myth of "peak oil"

[Geolibertarian]

From pages 108-114 of Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast (all emphasis original):

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...we really should take a look at the theory that we went into Iraq to get its oil. A ride up “Hubbert’s Peak” will allow a clearer view of the real topic of this chapter: the geo-politics of petroleum.

No Peaking: The Hubbert Humbug

On March 7, 1956, geologist M. King Hubbert presented a research paper that would, a half century later, become the New Gospel of Internet Economics, the Missing Link that would Explain It All from the September 11 attack to the invasion of Iraq.

In his 1956 paper, Hubbert wrote:

On the basis of the present estimates of the ultimate reserves of world petroleum and natural gas, it appears that the culmination of world production of these products should occur within a half a century (i.e., by 2006).

So get in your Hummer and take your last drive, Clive. Sometime during 2006, we will have used up every last drop of crude oil on the planet. We’re not talking “decline” in oil from a production “peak,” we’re talking “culmination,” completely gone, kaput, dead out of crude--and not enough natural gas left to roast a weenie.

In his 1956 treatise, Hubbert wrote that Planet Earth could produce not a drop more than one and a quarter trillion barrels of crude.

We obtain a figure of about 1,250 billion barrels for the ultimate potential reserves of crude oil of the whole world.

That’s the entire supply of crude that stingy Mother Nature bequeathed for human use from Adam to the end of civilization. Indeed, our oil-lusting world will have consumed, by the end of 2006, about 1.2 trillion barrels of oil. Therefore, by Hubbert’s calculation, we’re finished; maybe in the very week you read this book we’ll suck the planet dry. Then, as Porky Pig says, “That’s all, folks!”

But the pig ain’t sung yet. Planes still fly, lovers still cry and smog-o-saurus SUVs still choke the LA freeway. Why aren’t our gas tanks dry? Hubbert insisted Arabia could produce no more than 375 billion barrels of oil. Yet, Middle Eastern oil reserves remaining today total 734 billion barrels. And those are “proven” reserves--known and measured, not including the possibility of a single new oil strike or field extension. Worldwide, ready-to-go reserves total 1.189 trillion barrels--and that excludes the world’s two biggest untapped fields, which could easily double the world reserve. (One is in Iraq, the other we'll get to in Chapter 4.)

In all fairness to the Hubbert Heads, there’s a more sophisticated, updated version of Hubbert’s theory. This is where the “peak” concept comes in. In this version of the Hubbert scripture, we ignore his dead wrong prediction of total crude available and look only at the up and down shape of his curve, the “peak.” The amount of oil discovered each year, Hubbert posited, will stop rising by 2000, then will crash rapidly toward zero when we will have used up our allotted 1.25 trillion barrels.

We haven’t crashed or even peaked. Oil production has risen year after year after year and discoveries have more than kept pace. Nevertheless, like believers undaunted by the failure of alien spaceships to take them to Mars on the date predicted, Peak enthusiasts keep moving the date of the oil apocalypse further into the future. In the new, revisionist models of Hubbert’s prediction, the high point in the curve of discoverable oil on our planet will come in a decade or so. Though we have a reprieve, goes the new theory, still, we’re running out of crude, dude! There’s only another twenty years left in proven reserves! Oh, my!

“It’s true that there’s only twenty years’ supply left-and that’s been true for the last hundred years,” Lewis Lapham told me over a decent sauterne at Five Points....Lapham of Harper’s magazine is the only editor in the hemisphere with hard knowledge of the petroleum market, insight he inherited legitimately: His family helped found Mobil Oil, the back half of what is now ExxonMobil.

He asked, “Why in the world would oil companies, or any company, announce that there’s lots of its product out there? You’d bust your own market. It’s better to say the cupboard’s bare.” As Lapham noted, we have been “running out of oil” since the days we drained it from whales.

OPEC’s big headache before the war shut down Iraq’s fields was that there was way too much oil. We were swimming in it and oil prices stayed low. The last thing oil companies want is more oil from Iraq, any more than soybean farmers want more soybeans from Iraq. Increasing supply means decreasing price.

This war is about the oil, but what about the oil? The Hubbert Peaksters think they know. They are convinced that Dick Cheney in his bunker is panicked that the world’s supply of oil is about to run out, and so to Iraq we go, to seize the last of it. Here’s the flaw in that argument: To believe that George Bush and Dick Cheney hustled us into Iraq to open up that nation’s untapped bounty of petroleum is to believe that these two oil Texans in the White House are deeply troubled that the price of oil will rise unless they get us more crude. But Dick and George get a rise out of the rise.

Have we peaked? The planet is producing today twice as much as the maximum predicted in 1956 by the “Peaking Man.” But the political uses of holy-sh*t-we’re-running-out-of-oil! has yet to peak.

Indeed, Bush and Cheney are more than happy to allow others to promote Hubbert Peak hysteria in the public. “We need Iraq’s oil” is used as a good bogeyman to get the public behind an invasion that promises to get Americans a fill-up for the family gas guzzler for less than a hundred dollars. Anti-war progressives seized on the Hubbert humbug as proof that Bush’s invasion was a war of “Blood for Oil.” Nuns, professors and rock stars were outraged. But the average American thinks, Blood for oil? That’s a BARGAIN.

The Shell Game

Hubbert’s predictions may have been astonishingly wrong but his little forty-page research report is, nevertheless, astonishingly important in understanding the mindset of Big Oil.

Almost everything you need to know about Hubbert and the agenda behind his crucial 1956 study is contained on its cover page. The oil doomsday pronouncement is “Publication No. 95, Shell Development Company, Houston, Texas.” Hubbert was the chief Consultant on general geology for Shell Oil and his “end of oil” paper was presented to the Texas meeting of the American Petroleum Institute. All else flows therefrom.

Every once in a while the landlords of the planet have to remind us to be grateful for their services. In 1956 it was Shell Oil’s turn and Hubbert was their man for the job. It was not a happy time for the oilmen of Texas. Shell and the other Seven Sisters, as Big Oil was then known, faced a heck of a problem: crude was cheaper than dirt--$2.77 a barrel, that is, a nickel a gallon-and sinking. Worse, they were finding more of the stuff all over the planet, meaning prices would fall further.

In March of that year, Hubbert presented the solution to his fellow oilmen at the API in Houston. He unveiled this magical chart. [viewable here]

Look closely. When Hubbert spoke, oil reserves worldwide were zooming heavenward. Despite the tide of petroleum rising around us, Hubbert declared that oil discoveries in the USA had begun to peak “as recently as 1951 or 1952" and that the world’s reserves would follow not long thereafter. He didn’t need to wink. His oil industry audience understood what oil giant Shell wanted America to believe: Oil isn’t abundant, it’s a scarce commodity and therefore...

1. It’s too cheap--so oil companies should, for the public’s own good, raise the price to conserve this precious resource.
2. We need to find an abundant alternative to fossil fuel.
3. We need to protect our access to dwindling sources of crude, by force if necessary.

Shell Oil, through Hubbert, sought, successfully, to change the way America thought of oil’s price, alternatives to oil and access to oil.

PRICE: The problem of falling oil prices was solved for Shell, brilliantly, in four years, in 1960, by the creation of OPEC. On paper, OPEC was created by national governments. If oil companies had created this cartel to fix prices, that would have made it a criminal conspiracy--cartels are illegal. But when governments conspire for the same purpose, the illegal conspiracy turns into a legitimate “alliance” of sovereign states. OPEC’s government cover makes the price-fixing perfectly legal, and Big Oil reaps the rewards....

Have we peaked? Worldwide oil reserves continue to rise even faster than America and China can burn it. Since 1980, reserves, despite our binge-guzzling, have risen from 648 billion to 1.2 trillion barrels. Yet, weirdly, despite the rising flood of discovered crude, its price quadrupled between 2001 and 2005. Supply choked, yet there’s no peak in sight....

So please don’t slander Mother Earth and say she’s run out of oil when it’s man-made mischief to blame. Evil, not geology, has a chokehold on energy; nature is ready to give us crude at $12 a barrel where it was just a few short years ago.



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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5088683890635214113

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.counterpunch.org/zadeh10012008.html

The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

By Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
CounterPunch
October 1, 2008

The Peak Oil theory maintains that world production of conventional oil will soon reach a maximum, or peak, and decline thereafter, with grave socio-economic consequences. Some proponents of the theory argue that world oil production has already peaked, and is now in a terminal decline [1].

Although, on the face of it, this sounds like a fairly reasonable proposition, it has been challenged on both theoretical and empirical grounds. While some critics have called it a myth, others have branded it as a money-making scam promoted by the business interests that are vested in the fossil fuel industry, in the business of war and militarism, and in the Wall Street financial giants that are engaged in manipulative oil speculation.

Regardless of its validity (or lack thereof), the fact is that Peak Oil has had significant policy and political implications. It has also generated considerable reactions among various interest groups and political activists.

While environmental and similar activists have used Peak Oil to promote more vigorous conservation and more energetic pursuit of alternative fuels, the oil industry and its representatives in and out of the government have taken advantage of Peak Oil to argue in support of unrestrained extraction of oil and expanded drilling in the offshore or wildlife regions.

Because of its simple logic and facile appeal, Peak Oil has also led many ordinary citizens, burdened by high fuel bills during periods of energy crisis, to support unrestrained or expanded drilling. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 57 percent of Americans favor more offshore drilling. Misled and misplaced popular perceptions, in turn, play into the hands of the oil industry and their representatives to lobby for the lifting of the Federal ban on oil production in hitherto restricted regions.

Citing voter anger over soaring energy prices, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee, recently argued that opening vast stretches of the country’s coastline to oil exploration would help America eliminate the dependence on foreign oil. "We have untapped oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production," he said. "It is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions" [2].

Perhaps the financial giants of New York and London have benefited the most from the misleading implications of Peak Oil: “As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. . . . Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the tail that wags the dog,” points out William Engdahl, a top expert on energy and financial markets [3].

Just as Peak Oil plays into the hands of manipulative speculators and beneficiaries of fossil fuel, so too can it be used by the champions of unilateral wars and military adventures, as it implies that war power and military strength are key to access or control of the “shrinking” or “soon-to-be-shrinking” oil. It thus provides fodder for the cannons of war profiteering militarists who are constantly on the look out to invent new enemies and find new pretexts for continued war and escalation of military spending—that is, for the looting of the national treasury, or public money.

By the same token that Peak Oil can serve as a pretext for war and military adventures, it can also serve as a disarming or pacifying factor for many citizens who accept the Peak Oil thesis and, therefore, internalize responsibility for U.S. foreign policy every time they fill their gas tank. In a vicarious way, they may feel that they own the war!

Thus, Peak Oil serves as a powerful trap and a clever manipulation that lets the real forces of war and militarism (the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby), and the main culprits behind the soaring energy prices (the Wall Street financial giants engaged in manipulative commodity speculation) off the hook; it is a fabulous distraction. All evils are blamed on a commodity upon which we are all utterly dependent.

Not only millions of lay-citizens, but also many scholars and academics have taken the bait and fallen right into this trap by arguing that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven primarily by oil and other “scarce” resources. More broadly, they argue that most wars of the future, like the recent and/or present ones, will be driven by conflicts over natural resources, especially energy and water—hence, for example, the title of Michael T. Klare’s popular book, Resource Wars [4].

As a number of critics have pointed out, this is reminiscent of Thomas R. Malthus’s theory of “scarcity” and “overpopulation.” Malthus (1766-1834), a self-styled British economist, argued that the woes and vagaries of capitalism such as poverty, inequality and unemployment are largely to be blamed on the poor and the unemployed, since they produce too many mouths to be fed, or too many hands to be employed.

In a similar fashion, Peak Oil implies that current crisis in energy (and other commodities) markets is to be blamed, in part, on less-developed or relatively poorer nations such as India and China for growing “too fast” and creating “too much” demand on “scarce” resources. (Similarities between the Peak Oil theory and the Malthusian theory of scarcity are further discussed below.)

[Continued...]


http://www.prisonplanet.com/archives/peak_oil/index.htm

The Myth Of Peak Oil

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
PrisonPlanet.com
October 12 2005

Peak oil is a scam designed to create artificial scarcity and jack up prices while giving the state an excuse to invade our lives and order us to sacrifice our hard-earned living standards.

Publicly available CFR and Club of Rome strategy manuals from 30 years ago say that a global government needs to control the world population through neo-feudalism by creating artificial scarcity. Now that the social architects have de-industrialized the United States, they are going to blame our economic disintegration on lack of energy supplies.

Globalization is all about consolidation. Now that the world economy has become so centralized through the Globalists operations, they are going to continue to consolidate and blame it on the West's "evil" overconsumption of fossil fuels, while at the same time blocking the development and integration of renewable clean technologies.

In other words, Peak oil is a scam to create artificial scarcity and drive prices up. Meanwhile, alternative fuel technologies which have been around for decades are intentionally suppressed.

Peak oil is a theory advanced by the elite, by the oil industry, by the very people that you would think peak oil would harm, unless it was a cover for another agenda. Which from the evidence of artificial scarcity being deliberately created, the reasons for doing so and who benefits, it’s clear that peak oil is a myth and it should be exposed for what it is. Another excuse for the Globalists to seize more control over our lives and sacrifice more American sovereignty in the meantime.

The lies of artificial scarcity

The crux of the issue is that if oil was plentiful in areas in which we are being told by the government and the oil companies that it is not, then we have clear evidence that artificial scarcity is being simulated in order to drive forward a myriad of other agendas. And we have concrete examples of where this has happened.



Three separate internal confidential memos from Mobil, Chevron and Texaco have been obtained by The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.

These memos outline a deliberate agenda to gouge prices and create artificial scarcity by limiting capacities of and outright closing oil refineries. This was a nationwide lobbying effort led by the American Petroleum Institute to encourage refineries to do this.

An internal Chevron memo states; "A senior energy analyst at the recent API convention warned that if the US petroleum industry doesn't reduce its refining capacity it will never see any substantial increase in refinery margins."

The Memos make clear that blockages in refining capacity and opening new refineries did not come from environmental organizations, as the oil industry claimed, but via a deliberate policy of limitation and price gouging at the behest of the oil industry itself.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.counterpunch.org/nader04292006.html

Break Up the Big Oil Cartel

Republican Rhetoric; Democratic Cluelessness

By Ralph Nader
CounterPunch
April 29 / 30, 2006

What a week it has been for the giant oil companies! Billions in record quarterly profits rushing into their coffers. An even bigger round of quarterly profits coming up. Gargantuan executive pay bonanzas. And a pile of "forces beyond our control" excuses to publicize in response to the empty outrage of Washington politicians and the real squeeze on consumers and small businesses.

Oil man Bush, atop his administration marinated with ex-oil executives in high positions, keeps saying there is little he can do. It is the market of supply and demand. Only fuel cells and hydrogen sometime down the 21st-century road can save the country from dependency on foreign oil, he says repeatedly. Plus more drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

The public heat about energy prices prodded Mr. Bush this week, however, to at least make a little change in rhetoric. He repeated his warning that his government will not tolerate any gouging. Yet the supine reporters did not ask him whether he has ever caught a gouger. But he did mumble something about higher fuel economy standards so that your car guzzles a little less gasoline. He said he will be meeting with the domestic auto company executives in the White House in mid-May. He praised ethanol again. He visited a gas station in Mississippi to feel the pain of the motorists.

Will Hollywood ever leave Washington, DC?

On Capitol Hill--aka wurthering heights--the Republicans are starting to talk tough, mumbling about larger taxes on oil industry profits--an idea Bush said he would veto last year. The Democrats cannot even agree on an excess profits tax, preferring the greasy band-aid of lifting the 18.4 cent gasoline tax for sixty days. This new detour is pathetic since it takes the heat off the industry's skyrocketing gasoline price which are well into the $3 to $4/gallon range in many places.

A few, very few members of Congress, like Senator Byron Dorgan (D--North Dakota) know what has to be done to this industry and its long-time grip over the federal government. First, the gouging profits must be recaptured and returned now to the consumer. The government must also invest in advanced public transit systems.

Big oil has been on a marriage binge and the mergers, including the wedding of Exxon (number one) and Mobil (number two), have tightened further the corporate cartel of oil as it feeds off the government producers' cartel of oil abroad. Antitrust break up action is necessary.

The claim by the oil barons that they're just responding to the marketplace of supply and demand is laughable. Why are they making double and triple profits? Why are their top executives tripling their own pay? Hard-pressed sellers of oil would not have such a luxurious profit and pay spiral. Hard-pressed sellers of oil would not have paid $144,000 every day to Exxon CEO, Lee Raymond since 1993 and then send him off with a $398 million retirement deal.

A competitive domestic oil industry would not be so able to close down scores of refineries and then turn "refinery shortages" into higher gas prices at the pump. Nor would competitive companies get away with a return on capital of 46 percent for upstream drilling and production operations, plus a 32 percent for refining and marketing. Washington Post business reporter, Steven Pearlstein, call these returns "hedge fund returns." Except with hedge funds there is a risk of losing from time to time. Not so with the corporate government of Big Oil.

A President, preoccupied with his criminal, fabricated war in Iraq, would not leave Americans defenseless as oil prices eat into their family budgets. A standup President would order an all-fronts investigation of the oil industry's pricing practices from the oil well to the gasoline station.

There would be full use of subpoenas and public testimony from the oil bosses under oath by his regulatory agencies. He would organize with his Republican majority in Congress a repeal of past and recent unconscionable tax breaks and stop giving away your oil on federal property in the Gulf of Mexico to the oil companies without any royalties. He would press for an excess-profits tax and legislation raising by statute the fuel efficiency performance for new motor vehicles, including SUVs, Minivans and light trucks.

A standup President would raise margin requirements to tone down the speculation in oil futures that are swelling the New York Mercantile Exchange and contributing to higher gasoline and heating oil prices. He would support tariffs on imported refinery products to push the companies to expand and build new cleaner refineries in the U.S. Where? In some of the exact locations where the oil industry shut down these refineries over the past thirty years to contract overall output and move operations to cheap labor locations abroad.

[Continued...]


http://motherjones.com/politics/2000/07/solution-rising-gas-prices-antitrust-action

The Solution to Rising Gas Prices: Antitrust Action

Merger mania in the oil industry demands more government intervention in the market, in the style of the Microsoft breakup. The only other choice is anathema to big business: federal regulation.

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
MotherJones
July 6, 2000

The startling concentration of economic power that has resulted from the US merger wave of the last several years is going to require new levels of government intervention in the marketplace.
Either the federal and state governments will act to break up monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations, or government agencies will assume regulatory authority of a kind largely abandoned in the United States, or consumers will be gouged and innovation stifled.

Case in point: the oil industry and skyrocketing gasoline prices--now more than $2 gallon in parts of the Midwest.

Vigorous antitrust enforcement may be preferable to government regulation. But government regulation of industry is certainly preferable to industry regulation of consumers and the marketplace.

A year and a half ago, when Exxon and Mobil merged in an effective effort to begin restoration of John Rockefeller's Standard Oil, the conventional wisdom was that the merger would not affect gas prices.

"The change in the structure of the industry is such that the trend toward lower gasoline prices and more efficient distribution of gasoline is well underway and this is not going to stop it," one analyst said to National Public Radio in a typical remark of the day.

The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel went so far as to say that predictions that the Exxon-Mobil merger would increase prices were "delusional."

Now, conventional wisdom is rapidly changing.

With oil prices skyrocketing nationwide, prices spiking in the Midwest and industry profits reaching stratospheric heights, even the Clinton administration has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the oil industry is illegally colluding to raise prices.

The oil industry, as always, has a series of rationalizations for the sudden jump in gas prices.

OPEC has cut production and world prices have risen, say industry representatives, even as global demand is increasing. The industry also complains that a Unocal patent on a means to formulate cleaner-burning gas has impeded the use of the most efficient gasoline formulation techniques. All of that's true, but those factors do not account either for the unique price spike in the Midwest, nor for the surge in industry profits.

New requirements to sell cleaner-burning gasoline have boosted prices, the industry complains, and led to special difficulties in the Midwest, where refiners use ethanol instead of alternative blending components. That's also true, but the Environmental Protection Agency -- noting that the oil industry has had six years to prepare itself for the implementation of cleaner fuel standards that the industry helped negotiate -- says the cleaner-burning gas should only cost 4 to 7 cents more per gallon.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that some significant part of the story involves industry profiteering -- with the oil giants using the input cost increases from OPEC and the reformulated gasoline standards as cover to pile on additional charges.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/oil-companies-conspiring-to-jack-up-gasoline-prices-by-creating-artificial-scarcity.html

Oil Companies Conspiring To Jack Up Gasoline Prices By Creating Artificial Scarcity

Internal oil company documents prove conspiracy to reduce refinery capacity in order to jack up prices

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, April 16, 2010

Alex Jones appeared on Russia Today to expose how major oil companies are driving up the price of gasoline by reducing refinery capacity, a familiar ploy that was exposed by Senator Ron Wyden’s 2001 investigation which published leaked oil company documents proving collusion between oil cartels to manufacture artificial scarcity.

We were particularly amused by the woeful inaccuracy of a neo-con in the You Tube comments section who claimed the following.

“Jones is such a fraudster. Jim Tucker is an old conspiracy crackpot fart who make ridiculous crackpot conspiracy du jour claims repeatedly that never are true. It’s the environmentalists and their Democrats politicians that are blocking new refineries. Jones definitely doesn’t know anything about the oil business.”

In actual fact, Tucker has become renowned for making accurate predictions. He reported that the invasion of Iraq had been delayed by Bilderberg until 2003 when all the corporate media was reporting a 2002 attack date in unison.

On the subject of major oil cartels artificially reducing refinery capacity in order to jack up profits, this was reported on as recently as last month by the L.A. Times.

“Energy companies are suffering huge losses from refining because of slumping gasoline use — a product of the economic downturn and changing consumer habits and preferences. Energy experts say refining cutbacks have begun and will accelerate as corporations strive for profits,” states the report.

Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, makes reference to the leaked documents Alex referred to in the interview, where oil companies conspired to create artificial scarcity.

“We know from internal documents from the last time we had a situation like this, in the 1990s, that there was an intentional strategy on the part of some companies to drive up profit margins by shuttering or closing refineries,” states Slocum.

A 2001 investigation led by Senator Ron Wyden found that, “Facing what they deemed inadequate profit margins in the mid-1990’s, oil companies readily recognized that the surest way to drive up profits was to drive down oil and gasoline supply. By restricting supply, they would be able to demand higher prices and reap higher margins for their product.”

The full report, as well as excerpts from the oil company internal documents proving collusion to reduce refinery capacity can be read here [.pdf].

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/gulf-oil-rig-fiasco-it%e2%80%99s-about-scarcity-and-world-government.html

Gulf Oil Rig Fiasco: It’s About Scarcity and World Government

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 2, 2010

A second oil rig has overturned on the Gulf coast. It is not being widely reported. The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch reports:

The U.S. Coast Guard said Friday it is responding to a second oil-rig accident. A “mobile inland drilling unit” with a 20,000-gallon diesel fuel capacity overturned in the Charenton navigational channel south of U.S. Highway 90 near Morgan City, La. No fuel leak or injuries have been reported but 500 feet of containment boom has been deployed around the rig, the Coast Guard said.

On Friday, radio talk show host and former Reagan cabinet advisor Mark Levin accused the Obama administration of a plot to nationalize the oil industry. “I think those SWAT teams are there in coordination with the attorney general’s office, the Interior Department, Homeland Security, maybe the EPA….to seize records at these sites and to lay the foundation for more government takeover,” said Levin.

Obama said on Thursday he was dispatching SWAT teams to inspect oil rigs in the Gulf, a response that struck many observers as odd.

This is a public relations stunt designed to make Americans think the federal government is responding to the disaster. In fact, the government has no intention of doing anything significant. Obama’s response if purely cosmetic and for public consumption.

Levin and many Republicans think Obama is a Marxist and wants a Soviet-like centralized economy. Obama, however, is not surrounded by textbook Marxists who want a revolution in the name of the proles. He is surrounded by bankers and monopoly men. The Obama administration is a creature of the CFR, Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, and Wall Street banks, not the Comintern.

Oil rigs are being attacked in order to shut down oil production, not nationalize it. The name of the game is artificial scarcity designed to further cripple the economy.

On Friday, Obama promised that no new offshore oil drilling leases will be issued unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the explosion that unleashed the massive spill threatening the Gulf Coast, according to the Associated Press.

The number of structures in the Gulf is roughly 4,000, with 819 manned platforms. How long do you think it will take an ossified federal government to install these safeguards?

As Lindsey Williams has noted, the global elite are manipulating oil in order to create a world-wide economic depression. “America will see a financial collapse so great that it will take years to come out of it,” Williams told Alex Jones on November 21, 2008.

“Publicly available CFR and Club of Rome strategy manuals from 30 years ago say that a global government needs to control the world population through neo-feudalism by creating artificial scarcity,” Steve Watson, Alex Jones and Paul Watson wrote in 2005. “Now that the social architects have de-industrialized the United States, they are going to blame our economic disintegration on lack of energy supplies.”

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” asked Maurice Strong, the founder of the UN Environment Program, during his opening speech at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

During an interview conducted in 1972, Strong talked about the concept of zero growth put forward by the Club of Rome in the late 1960s which called for the control of population and economic growth. The Club of Rome is a neo-Malthusian organization with interlocking membership with the European banking elite such as the Committee of 300 and the Bilderberg Group.

“Federal authorities have shut down two offshore platforms and evacuated one of them near a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” reports the Associated Press today. “The Coast Guard said Saturday that the shutdowns were a safety precaution.”

More offshore platforms will likely be shut down in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are calling for expanded oil exploration plans to be dropped. “I’ve said to the White House, ‘Don’t you dare think about your five-year plans [for offshore oil leases] … We’re just not going to let you,’” said Florida Sen. Bill Nelson on Friday. “Nelson said the state’s multibillion-dollar tourist industry and fisheries shouldn’t be imperiled for oil’s sake. He said the spill may ultimately serve as a lesson that the country needs to develop cleaner energy sources,” reports The Florida Times-Union.

As if on cue, the Soros foundation MoveOn has called on its members to telephone the White House and demand that Obama reinstate the ban on offshore oil drilling. “The MoveOn campaign is just one of a series of pleas from lawmakers and environmental groups for the administration to reverse its policy in the wake of the explosion and spill,” reports The Washington Post.

The explosion and massive oil spill will be used to make sure artificial oil scarcity continues. The ultimate goal is not clean energy or so-called energy independence but delivering the once great United States into the maw of the bankers who are determined to consolidate power and convert the world into a sprawling high-tech prison planet.