Fueling Our Demise; It’s Not CITGO
CITGO is an image firmly implanted in my mind from many years past. It is a logo decal I personally applied on many oil and propane trucks and gasoline pumps. In 1965 Cities Service Oil Company rolled out the new name. It was a big deal: forty million dollars to convert and closed circuit TV around the country for the formal announcement hosted by Johnny Carson. I attended the eastern NC formal rollout event at the Ambassador Theatre in Raleigh, NC. Later, 1973, Esso changed its logo to Exxon, putting a tiger in the tank, for a cost of over one hundred million dollars. (In 1965 a million dollars was a million, when we sold gasoline for 25 cents per gal.) Citgo became state wholly owned by Venezuela in 1990. It’s very sad now to see ill will cast on this sentimental brand by the despicable Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela.
Venezuela is a Federal republic https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html#2128, and probably the lesser of the so-called fiends from which the U. S. imports most of its oil. Venezuela’s population is just less than twenty-six million, with a religious population of 98% Christian. Chavez should long be gone, hopefully, – even as we’ll continue competing for oil in other places and dealing with the petro-authoritarians as Thomas Friedman calls them in Sept. 27th N Y Times.
· According to the Energy Information Administration http://www.eia.doe.gov/: In 2005, United States refineries produced over 90 percent of the gasoline used in the United States. Less than 40 percent of the crude oil used by U.S. refineries was produced in the United States. About 45 percent of gasoline produced in the United States comes from refineries in the U.S. Gulf Coast (including Texas and Louisiana). Jan through June 2006 21% of our oil came from Persian Gulf, which includes Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
Friedman’s Fill ’Er Up With Dictators Op-Ed excerpt (full text attached or read at: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/opinion/27friedman.html?th&emc=th ):
“For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and some having to do with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the price of crude oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long run, we want the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of gasoline to go down in America just when $3 a gallon has started to stimulate large investments in alternative energies. That is exactly what OPEC wants — let the price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and then bring it up again.”
In my opinion Thomas Friedman (author of The World is Flat) is one of the most brilliant, well-informed writers, a world savvy citizen, and he is usually right on key in important issues. But is anyone listening, when will our leaders come to their senses and do the right thing, putting politics aside? I, however, would differ with him on where the energy investment tax should be put. Put it on the gas guzzling vehicles, based on rated mileage – the lower the mileage the more the tax, at point of vehicle sale. That would give incentive to the manufacture and purchaser alike. It would let the affluent and those who take pride in luxurious large automobiles, those who burn the gas and wear out the roads, pay for the future energy discoveries and road repairs that we do not now have nor the money to pay for them. Oh that our congress would have done something of this nature a few years ago: would it not have been saving grace for the American automobile manufactures that now find themselves struggling to survive?
When will America wakeup to the fact that millions of our petro-dollars, maybe billions, are finding its way into the hands of terrorist and Wahhabi schools in Islamic countries, where much of the brainwashing of Muslim youth occurs? When will our leaders understand and have the courage to do what it takes to make America energy independent? Energy independence is the one thing that most of all will eliminate the aim of petro bullets and bombs killing our servicemen and make our nation more secure.
So, brilliant Mr. Thomas Friedman, we will not have an energy investment tax. Will we? Like on so many other important issues, we’ll just keep on fueling our demise.
Should we now ask ourselves:
Are you having fun yet?
What’s a matter? No sense of humor? You didn’t enjoy watching Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressing the U.N. General Assembly and saying of President Bush: “The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today.” Many U.N. delegates roared with laughter.
Oh well then, you must have enjoyed watching Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad breezing through New York City, lecturing everyone from the U.N. to the Council on Foreign Relations on the evils of American power and how the Holocaust was just a myth.
C’mon then, you had to at least have gotten a chuckle out of China’s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, trying to block a U.N. resolution calling for the deployment of peacekeeping troops to Sudan to halt the genocide in Darfur. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent of the Sudan consortium that pumps over 300,000 barrels of oil a day from Sudanese wells.
No? You’re not having fun? Well, you’d better start seeing the humor in all this, because what all these stories have in common is today’s most infectious geopolitical disease: petro-authoritarianism.
Yes, we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable wave of free markets and free people, and it did for about a decade, when oil prices were low. But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of his mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin America and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into a ditch.
For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and some having to do with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the price of crude oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long run, we want the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of gasoline to go down in America just when $3 a gallon has started to stimulate large investments in alternative energies. That is exactly what OPEC wants — let the price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and then bring it up again.
For now, we still need to make sure, either with a gasoline tax or a tariff on imported oil, that we keep the price at the pump at $3 or more — to stimulate various alternative energy programs, more conservation and a structural shift by car buyers and makers to more fuel-efficient vehicles.
“If Bush were the leader he claims to be, he would impose an import fee right now to keep gasoline prices high, and reduce the tax rate on Social Security for low-income workers, so they would get an offsetting increase in income,” argued Philip Verleger Jr., the veteran energy economist.
That is how we can permanently break our oil addiction, and OPEC, and free ourselves from having to listen to these petro-authoritarians, who are all so smug — not because they are educating their people or building competitive modern economies, but because they happen to sit on oil.
According to Bloomberg.com, in 2005 Iran earned $44.6 billion from crude oil exports, its main source of income. In the same year, the mullahs spent $25 billion on subsidies to buy off the population. Bring the price of oil down to $30 and guess what happens: All of Iran’s income goes to subsidies. That would put a terrible strain on Ahmadinejad, who would have to reach out to the world for investment. Trust me, at $30 a barrel, the Holocaust isn’t a myth anymore.
But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarianism — not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.
CITGO is an image firmly implanted in my mind from many years past. It is a logo decal I personally applied on many oil and propane trucks and gasoline pumps. In 1965 Cities Service Oil Company rolled out the new name. It was a big deal: forty million dollars to convert and closed circuit TV around the country for the formal announcement hosted by Johnny Carson. I attended the eastern NC formal rollout event at the Ambassador Theatre in Raleigh, NC. Later, 1973, Esso changed its logo to Exxon, putting a tiger in the tank, for a cost of over one hundred million dollars. (In 1965 a million dollars was a million, when we sold gasoline for 25 cents per gal.) Citgo became state wholly owned by Venezuela in 1990. It’s very sad now to see ill will cast on this sentimental brand by the despicable Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela.
Venezuela is a Federal republic https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html#2128, and probably the lesser of the so-called fiends from which the U. S. imports most of its oil. Venezuela’s population is just less than twenty-six million, with a religious population of 98% Christian. Chavez should long be gone, hopefully, – even as we’ll continue competing for oil in other places and dealing with the petro-authoritarians as Thomas Friedman calls them in Sept. 27th N Y Times.
· According to the Energy Information Administration http://www.eia.doe.gov/: In 2005, United States refineries produced over 90 percent of the gasoline used in the United States. Less than 40 percent of the crude oil used by U.S. refineries was produced in the United States. About 45 percent of gasoline produced in the United States comes from refineries in the U.S. Gulf Coast (including Texas and Louisiana). Jan through June 2006 21% of our oil came from Persian Gulf, which includes Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
Friedman’s Fill ’Er Up With Dictators Op-Ed excerpt (full text attached or read at: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/opinion/27friedman.html?th&emc=th ):
“For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and some having to do with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the price of crude oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long run, we want the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of gasoline to go down in America just when $3 a gallon has started to stimulate large investments in alternative energies. That is exactly what OPEC wants — let the price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and then bring it up again.”
In my opinion Thomas Friedman (author of The World is Flat) is one of the most brilliant, well-informed writers, a world savvy citizen, and he is usually right on key in important issues. But is anyone listening, when will our leaders come to their senses and do the right thing, putting politics aside? I, however, would differ with him on where the energy investment tax should be put. Put it on the gas guzzling vehicles, based on rated mileage – the lower the mileage the more the tax, at point of vehicle sale. That would give incentive to the manufacture and purchaser alike. It would let the affluent and those who take pride in luxurious large automobiles, those who burn the gas and wear out the roads, pay for the future energy discoveries and road repairs that we do not now have nor the money to pay for them. Oh that our congress would have done something of this nature a few years ago: would it not have been saving grace for the American automobile manufactures that now find themselves struggling to survive?
When will America wakeup to the fact that millions of our petro-dollars, maybe billions, are finding its way into the hands of terrorist and Wahhabi schools in Islamic countries, where much of the brainwashing of Muslim youth occurs? When will our leaders understand and have the courage to do what it takes to make America energy independent? Energy independence is the one thing that most of all will eliminate the aim of petro bullets and bombs killing our servicemen and make our nation more secure.
The problem is congressmen’s refusal to put our country above politics:
- Neither Republicans nor Democrats can forgo the big campaign money from big oil (It’s reported that Republicans get 75-80%, Democrats 20-25%).
- Neither Republicans nor Democrats can forgo the big campaign money from auto manufactures.
- Big business and their lobbyist will not give up power plays to control greedy-selfish interest that has no redeeming value for American citizens.
- Any effort to enact any tax is sufficient stigmatization as villainous and confirmed by the opponent for a death sentence at the polls.
So, brilliant Mr. Thomas Friedman, we will not have an energy investment tax. Will we? Like on so many other important issues, we’ll just keep on fueling our demise.
Should we now ask ourselves:
- Is it time for public campaign financing?
- Is it time to take a hard look at our foreign policy?
What’s your opinion?
----------------------------------------
Reprinted in The News and Observer on Sept. 28th:
September 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Fill ’Er Up With Dictators
By
Are you having fun yet?
What’s a matter? No sense of humor? You didn’t enjoy watching Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressing the U.N. General Assembly and saying of President Bush: “The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today.” Many U.N. delegates roared with laughter.
Oh well then, you must have enjoyed watching Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad breezing through New York City, lecturing everyone from the U.N. to the Council on Foreign Relations on the evils of American power and how the Holocaust was just a myth.
C’mon then, you had to at least have gotten a chuckle out of China’s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, trying to block a U.N. resolution calling for the deployment of peacekeeping troops to Sudan to halt the genocide in Darfur. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent of the Sudan consortium that pumps over 300,000 barrels of oil a day from Sudanese wells.
No? You’re not having fun? Well, you’d better start seeing the humor in all this, because what all these stories have in common is today’s most infectious geopolitical disease: petro-authoritarianism.
Yes, we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable wave of free markets and free people, and it did for about a decade, when oil prices were low. But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of his mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin America and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into a ditch.
For a lot of reasons — some cyclical, some technical and some having to do with the emergence of alternative fuels and conservation — the price of crude oil has fallen lately to around $60 a barrel. Yes, in the long run, we want the global price of oil to go down. But we don’t want the price of gasoline to go down in America just when $3 a gallon has started to stimulate large investments in alternative energies. That is exactly what OPEC wants — let the price fall for a while, kill the alternatives, and then bring it up again.
For now, we still need to make sure, either with a gasoline tax or a tariff on imported oil, that we keep the price at the pump at $3 or more — to stimulate various alternative energy programs, more conservation and a structural shift by car buyers and makers to more fuel-efficient vehicles.
“If Bush were the leader he claims to be, he would impose an import fee right now to keep gasoline prices high, and reduce the tax rate on Social Security for low-income workers, so they would get an offsetting increase in income,” argued Philip Verleger Jr., the veteran energy economist.
That is how we can permanently break our oil addiction, and OPEC, and free ourselves from having to listen to these petro-authoritarians, who are all so smug — not because they are educating their people or building competitive modern economies, but because they happen to sit on oil.
According to Bloomberg.com, in 2005 Iran earned $44.6 billion from crude oil exports, its main source of income. In the same year, the mullahs spent $25 billion on subsidies to buy off the population. Bring the price of oil down to $30 and guess what happens: All of Iran’s income goes to subsidies. That would put a terrible strain on Ahmadinejad, who would have to reach out to the world for investment. Trust me, at $30 a barrel, the Holocaust isn’t a myth anymore.
But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Mr. Bush prattles on about spreading democracy and freedom, but history will actually remember the Bush years as the moment when petro-authoritarianism — not freedom and democracy — spread like a wildfire and he did nothing serious to stop it.
