George W. Bush Is Not Stupid
(He’s An Oil Man)

by

Neal Horsley

(Christian Gallery News Service, July 5, 2004) If you read what follows you will see evidence proving that the United States of America is on the brink of an oil crisis that—and this is no exaggeration--threatens the survival of the world as we presently know it.  When you see this evidence, you will begin to understand that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, President George W. Bush's actions might not be so stupid after all.

It’s easy to look at George W. Bush’s actions in Iraq and think that he and his administration are stupid as dirt: they start a war that looks like it will never end, a war that brings the threat of annihilation to countless hordes of Stateside Americans, and it turns out the reasons they gave to the public for starting the war are so bogus that nobody even bothers to talk about them anymore.

The impression of stupidity is enormously expanded by what Michael Moore reveals about George W. Bush in his documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.”  To watch the President of the United States sit in a child’s chair in a child’s classroom utterly flummoxed for over ten minutes after being informed that multiple fully loaded hijacked commercial airliners have begun to crash into strategically important targets across the country appears to be conclusive evidence that the sitting President of the United States of America has no independent insight or instincts into what a Commander in Chief of Armed Forces is supposed to do when he has been informed that his nation is under attack.

Following is a short synopsis of the event taken from thememoryhole.org, the web site that alerted the Internet (and Roger Moore) to the fact that Bush’s visit to the school had been filmed in its entirety. 

“At 9:03 AM on 11 September 2001, the second airplane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. President Bush was in Florida, at the Emma T. Booker Elementary School, listening to children read. Chief of Staff Andrew Card came over and whispered in Bush's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

“What did the Commander in Chief do? Nothing. He sat there. He sat for well over 5 minutes, doing nothing while 3,000 people were dying and the attacks were still in progress.

“Not only did the leader of the free world sit as his country was attacked, the Secret Service also did nothing. Bush was appearing in public at a previously announced photo-op. He was a sitting duck. The attacks were ongoing at that point (planes had yet to hit the Pentagon or the field in Pennsylvania), and nobody knew how much more destruction was going to happen. Were there two, three, four, eight more planes hijacked and on their way to crash into prominent buildings? Was one headed for the school, where anyone who checked the President's public itinerary would know he was located? Were other terrorists planning to detonate dirty nukes? Were they going to release anthrax or smallpox or sarin? Was an assassination squad going to burst into the school and get Bush? Was a suicide bomber going to ram a truck full of explosives into that classroom?

“During the midst of the attacks, any of these things could've happened. Yet there sits Bush, seemingly unconcerned. His Chief of Staff likewise doesn't think that America in flames warrants the President's immediate attention. And the Secret Service utterly fails to do its job by grabbing the President of the United States and getting him to safety. It's truly inexplicable,” the memoryhole.org article concluded.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took that footage and turned it into the center piece of a documentary that makes President George W. Bush look, at best, like a doofus or, at worst, like a collaborator in the terrorist attacks.

But before you reach a false conclusion that George W. Bush is simply stupid and then begin to think that America’s problems are going to be ameliorated by bringing in a new President, it is necessary to stop and take a long hard look at what is motivating the man.  That which appears to be stupid often masks deeper motivations that are not stupid at all.

President George W. Bush can be understood when you realize the man is controlled by the will to survive in a situation where the entire structural entity we call the United States of America is on the brink of chaos because we the people are in sight of the day when the oil wells of the world will run dry.  That day can bring a chaos to earth that would rival the chaos created by a huge meteor impact.

This article reveals to the general public facts that are already well known to the people who run the USA.  Because of the world-changing oil crisis in view, George W. Bush is being supported by the top level echelons of both the Republican and the Democratic political institutions.  What those people already know should be known by all. 

This article explains the roots of the potential chaos facing the US and provides you with evidence proving that when George W. Bush and his supporters started a war with Iraq, it wasn’t because they thought WMD was there but because they KNEW oil was there.  They went to war in Iraq, and they are supported in that war by the entire political establishment of the US, because they know you hired them to make the kind of hard survival decisions that sometimes require we the people to confiscate property that would normally belong to other people.  They haven’t told you about the facts outlined in this article because they know you like to perform, shall we say, “irregular” things, things like taking property that would normally belong to other people, in a way that is hidden from public view so you won’t be troubled in mind.

I write this article because I believe ignorance is only bliss in the short run.  The risks involved in these present actions taken by the US government far exceed any short term losses in peace of mind.  If we the people are going to survive, we need to think long and hard about the adventures this present regime is undertaking in our name.  And we need to begin to prepare now to survive the long term impact of the Oil meteor.

 

THE SHORT ANSWER THAT DEMONSTRATES WHY THE OIL CRUNCH IS ALREADY BEGINNING

As the charts at the bottom of this article demonstrate, simple arithmetic shows the global oil well is running dry.  In 1997, global oil use was running at more than 26.7 billion barrels per year.  The charts at the bottom of this article claim that in 2003 a little over 1000 billion barrels of oil was proven to be readily available on this planet.  1000 divided by 27 is a little over 37 years worth of oil.

When confronted by the equation above, we all want to believe that prospectors from the world’s oil companies are on the verge of finding more subterranean oceans of oil.  A New York Times article on May 2, 2004 entitled “The Oil Crunch,” by Paul Krugman crushes that hope.  The Times tells us, “no major oil fields have been found since 1976, and experts suspect that there are no more to find…” 

We all know that today’s technology provides tools that peer deep below the earth’s surface.  The entire earth has been scanned by those tools.  They see no more oceans of oil.

The Evidence:  Break It To Them Gently That Oil Is Vanishing

If you were in charge of the peoples of the United States of America and you sensed the nation was on the brink of an unprecedented calamity, you would most likely want to break the news gently and in bits and pieces.  Say, for instance, like the method that follows.

June, 2004, National Geographic

   

Excerpt from the National Geographic lead article: "And so oil companies are searching for new supplies and braving high costs, both human and economic. Making gambles like Thunder Horse and venturing into West Africa and Russia, they are still finding oil in quantities to gladden a Hummer owner's heart. But in the end the quest for more cheap oil will prove a losing game: Not just because oil consumption imposes severe costs on the environment, health, and taxpayers, but also because the world's oil addiction is hastening a day of reckoning."
 
"Humanity's way of life is on a collision course with geology—with the stark fact that the Earth holds a finite supply of oil. The flood of crude from fields around the world will ultimately top out, then dwindle. It could be 5 years from now or 30: No one knows for sure, and geologists and economists are embroiled in debate about just when the "oil peak" will be upon us. But few doubt that it is coming. "In our lifetime," says economist Robert K. Kaufmann of Boston University, who is 46, "we will have to deal with a peak in the supply of cheap oil."

In other words, according to National Geographic, it's not a matter of “if” we're going to run out of oil, it is a matter of “when.”

No one knows when the pressure from diminishing oil resources will drive the price of oil so high that the present world economic infrastructure would be destroyed.  But any reasonable person can see that the oil reserve equation above carries an exceedingly grim forecast about the future.

If you want to know what the Oil Crunch will look like for the foreseeable future, examine the Iraqi War.  What happened in Iraq will happen in any oil rich nation unwilling, ala Saddam Hussein, to guarantee oil at the price decreed by the government of the USA.  Iraq is a reminder, a living sticky note, sent by the US to all oil rich nations.  In the face of “uncooperative” leadership in oil rich countries, there will be a quick, surgical removal exactly like what happened in Iraq and a quick transfer of power to a regime that will do what the US requires--exactly like the transfer of power in Iraq.

The Oil Crunch can be likened to a meteor that has already begun to collide with planet earth, but the collision is occurring in excruciatingly slow motion.  The Iraqi War is the first evidence of impact.  Brace yourself, because the meteor has just barely begun to touch the crust of planet earth.  Just as if a real meteor had impacted the earth, we will all soon be forced to respond to the earthquake waves created by the Oil Crunch slowly, excruciatingly slowly, exploding around us today. And there is nothing you can do to avoid facing the meteor's impact.

 

THE LONG ANSWER THAT PROVES THE OIL CRUNCH IS ALREADY AT HAND

You can see the Oil Crunch for yourself when you begin to interpret the actions of the US government as if virtually all US foreign policy actions are prompted by a need to control the world’s oil resources.

The evidence proving the US government is moving to control the world’s oil is inescapable and undeniable.

The front page of the Wall Street Journal on June 30, 2004, two days after the US supposedly “returned sovereignty” to Iraq carried this headline, “As Threats to Oil Facilities Rise, U.S. Military Becomes Protector.”  The article stated, “The U.S. has long made oil security a foreign-policy priority.  But the challenge in the past was to cope with temporary threats of disruption…Now, however, the U.S. is bracing for an era of continuing attacks by insurgents bent on blocking the flow of a commodity vital to the world’s economy.  The result is shaping up to be a globe-spanning and open-ended U.S. campaign to offer protection.”

Focus particularly on the words “globe-spanning and open-ended.”  Those are all-encompassing words, words that speak volumes about America’s real foreign policy goals.  While the Wall Street Journal article defined a vast, ongoing commitment of American forces to protect Arab Gulf Region oil, it also described a much broader worldwide deployment of American military forces. “In Columbia, Army Special Forces are training a brigade of local commandos to protect a pipeline.  In Yemen and the Caucasus, the Coast Guard is training local forces who defend oil installations and shipping.”  The litany of American incursions across the world ended by pointing out that “regional governments loudly objected” when U.S. commanders began moves to position American forces to control the Strait of Malacca, a chokepoint between Malaysia and Indonesia through which a seventh of the world’s oil passes each day to booming Asia.”

It does not take a prophet to see that this redeployment of American forces will continue.  As each day passes, you will see evidence of a historically unparalleled intervention of American forces into oil hotspots around the world until it becomes obvious that the government of the USA is marshaling forces capable of making the USA the de facto owner of all the oil on planet earth.

Read what follows and you will see why this forecast can be made with certainty.  You will also see why such a move might well destroy the United States of America. 

THE CONTEXT

The Charade of Gulf Region National Sovereignty

On June 28, 2004 the news media of the world trumpeted headlines like this one from CNN:

U.S. returns sovereignty to Iraq

Handover comes 2 days before date coalition had announced

The New Zealand Herald, like the rest of the “free world,” joined in the applause by reporting how the news about the transfer of sovereignty was passed to President George W. Bush, “The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said President Bush learned that the handover had been completed from his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice…Handed the note, which said "Mr President, Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer at 10.26am Iraq time - Condi", Mr Bush passed it back, having scribbled: "Let freedom reign!"

 

The scene reported between Condi and…(what is President George W. Bush’s nickname among his family and friends?...Surely it can’t be W.)…is a metaphor for the entire charade of sovereignty that has been going on in the Middle East for the past sixty years.  The charade goes like this: Words about sovereignty are spoken by leaders of Great Powers, the world’s press parrots those words, finally the public grins and applauds that “Freedom” is being unleashed.  It’s a charade because the exact nations who were sovereign before the words about the transfer of sovereignty were spoken remain sovereign afterwards.  The only thing that actually changes is the names of the players on the scorecard.

 

You can see the charade for yourself when you learn facts like those revealed by Peter Grier, a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor who wrote on October 16, 2002, at a time when it was becoming apparent that the USA might actually be serious about invading Iraq, an article entitled, “Is It All About Oil?”. 

He said, “The US has served as the western world's guarantor of Gulf stability since the end of World War II, when it took over that role from a weakened Britain.”

Pause and think about that preceding sentence.  If the US is the “guarantor of Gulf stability” how can that stability be guaranteed unless the US can actually exercise, when put to the test, sovereignty over that territory?

The answer is obvious.  The US can only be the guarantor of Gulf stability if the US is in fact sovereign over the Gulf region of the world.

Nothing exposes the sovereignty charade better than this article in Time magazine.  “If Iraqi history was made Monday in Baghdad, nobody told the Iraqis. Literally: The transfer of political authority in Iraq from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to a largely U.S.-appointed Interim Government led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was brought forward two days early to avoid its moment in the headlines being bathed in blood by insurgent violence — the five-minute event attended only by handful of participants, aides and journalists passed in secrecy deep inside the "Green Zone" which separates government and Coalition facilities from the ever-dangerous streets of the capital. Still, Allawi proclaimed it "a historical day," and pledged to take aggressive steps to restore Iraq's security in the face of relentless insurgent violence.”

In other words, the US return of sovereignty that was trumpeted across the world as a milestone event was blacked out in Iraq.  That story demonstrates clearly that the events in Iraq are stage managed for a purpose that has little if anything to do with Iraqi sovereignty or the needs of the Iraqi people.

And of course, for anyone with even one eye that sees, the 150,000 plus American soldiers on the ground in Iraq, protected by the smartest bombs in the history of the world, proves conclusively that the US is sovereign in the Gulf, proves that the US is just as sovereign today on June 30, 2004 as it was on June 27, 2004, just as sovereign as it was on June 27, 1946, and just as sovereign as it will remain in the future unless Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Muslim brotherhood actually have their way and return sovereignty to the Nation of Islam the way legend says it used to be under Saladin.

WHY THE US FIGHTS TO BE SOVEREIGN

The Wall Street Journal article above only hints at the grave stakes involved in the oil business.  It does not take much thought to see why the US has been sovereign in the Gulf region since WW II.

 

Peter Grier explained in the Christian Science article written in 2002, “Oil – a commodity synonymous with wealth and power for a century – could be the great prize of a new US war with Iraq…Not that you'd know that from listening to most recent Washington rhetoric. President George W. Bush doesn't mention it when making his case for confrontation with Saddam Hussein. Lawmakers debating Iraq in Congress last week talked much more about Mr. Hussein's nuclear program than his vast oil reserves.”

Mr. Grier continued, “Oil, after all, is a main reason the US is so interested in the Middle East in the first place. The region remains the world's preeminent source of high-quality, easy-to-obtain petroleum, despite the resurgence of the Russian oil industry and the increased importance of Latin American petroleum exports,” Mr. Grier concluded.

Oil is not “a main reason”; as time will tell, oil is THE main reason the US government moves about the earth seeking whom it may devour.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY

Since the Second World War, there has been no real national sovereignty on planet earth except the national “sovereignty” that a Great Power like the USA would allow. 

If you are going to understand President George W. Bush, or any American President since at least the Second World War, you must understand them as people who lead one of The Great Powers.  In order to understand the real world, you must focus clearly on that “Great Power” concept.  In a discussion of context, there is no fact more important than the fact called The Great Powers.  A book that will help you understand why the concept called The Great Powers is so important is, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” by Paul M. Kennedy, a history professor at Yale.

One of the principle things you will learn from that book or any book that speaks truthfully about the Great Powers is that the Great Powers don’t have to worry about stealing things.

As American individuals, you and I have been trained to believe in the concept of private property.  That is the fundamental concept used to teach us not to be thieves.  We were told when we were growing up, “Children, you must respect other people’s property.  You must not steal it.  If you do, you will be punished.”

Most of us have never heard any other story about property.  But that is not true about George W. Bush.  As the child of one of the people born into the group that has historically provided the managers of the Great Powers, George W. Bush heard a different story about property at an early age.  Property, George W. Bush’s daddy told him, is not private at all when it is seen to be necessary for the survival of a Great Power.  Under those circumstances, all property rightfully belongs to The Great Power…if The Great Power can take it.  Which, of course, the Great Power can, because, well, the Great Power is a great power.

WHAT THE END OF OIL MEANS TO THE GREAT POWER

What follows is evidence that proves The Greatest Power on earth, the United States of America, is on the verge of running out of the one property that is required for the continuation of the USA as a Great Power. 

To put this evidence in perspective you must first get out of your mind the idea that George W. Bush is stupid.  Here’s why:  The choice we make about George W. Bush grows inevitably out of a simple equation. Either George W. Bush and the circle of advisors around him are so presumptuous, so stupid, and have such terrible political instincts that they make the most dangerous military decisions on earth on the basis of information about Weapons of Mass Destruction that proves to be false, or something other than the stupidity of an American President is going on in Iraq.

This article will demonstrate to you that the presence of 150,000 American soldiers (and counting) in Iraq is the conclusive evidence proving that those in the know in the oil industry (and you can bet your last dollar, or peso, or whatever, that George W. Bush is counted among that group) are convinced we have reached the place where American military force must make the control of world oil reserves its first priority in national defense. 

What follows will show you why control of oil is the existing regime’s first priority for American defense.

FOR NATIONAL SURVIVAL, NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT THAN OIL

To see why George W. Bush and the rest of the American leadership took the US to Iraq and why they are deploying American military forces across the globe, it is necessary to view oil as if you personally were responsible for providing survival to the American people.  From that point of view, nothing is more important than oil.

To see the point, take a quick look at the history of oil.

In the early 20th century, AD, as soon as it became obvious that the horseless carriage might well revolutionize individual transportation, some insightful old curmudgeon declared that it was the worst thing that could happen to mankind because when the oil ran out, we'd be in a hell of a mess.

Early 20th century Americans could not help but pause at the thought of empty oil wells.  Anybody who looked could see that Henry Ford's ability to put a car in every driveway meant a virtually endless supply of oil would be required to make Everyman's automobile investment make sense. 

So people paused and took a long hard look at oil.  When John D. Rockefeller and his fellow oil magnates could only show people the oil in Pennsylvania and other northeastern US venues, there was a lingering suspicion that it might be wise to hold your horses.   (With the failure of the steam driven horseless carriage, that phrase, "hold your horses" which had always been understood to mean, "Don't unsaddle your horse, you might need to move fast" took on the deeper technological meaning of "Don't put too much faith in the horseless carriage because it won't run without gasoline, and gasoline is nothing more than oil all dressed up for the city.")

When massive oceans of oil were discovered underneath Texas and the American Southwest in the first decade of the 20th century, pessimistic curmudgeons were out and the horseless carriage was in and the 20th century literally went on a roll that was fueled by oil from that day to this.

The Texas oil patch was the harbinger of the future.  For the past century, every time some old curmudgeon raised his head and said, "We're going to run out of oil!"  heirs to John D. Rockefeller sent their surveyors out over the earth and--lo and behold!--found new oceans of oil.  In fact, so much oil was discovered that we the people settled down, lost our "end of oil" fears, revved up our engines, and went about our business.

And what a business it was!  A writer won't risk much credibility by declaring that the automobile is the technology that made the 20th century run.  All you have to do is look at the amazingly long line of cars--three, four, five, six lanes wide--speeding down the expressways of every city in the USA and you see the means of our present way of life--And not just our way of life, but the way of life of every person in every even halfway developed country in the world.

The automobile is the means of our way of life because without it, hardly anybody has a way to get to work.  In other words, you can't work if you can't get to work.  It is the car that allows us to get to work. 

But the car can be the end of our present way of life as well.  If we can't get to work, we can’t get paid.  And if we don’t get paid, the economy that depends on consumer spending for its well-being starves to death like an AIDS patient with full-blown AIDS.  To use another metaphor, the entire economic house of cards built upon personal credit literally collapses when the cash flow generated by our work runs out of gas.  In a nation where hardly anybody has cash reserves sufficient to weather an interruption of cash flow, national meltdown would come in weeks rather than months after oil flow was interrupted.  Turn off the oil spigot that allows us to drive to work each day and this economy is dead.

Any person who actually pauses and thinks about how dependent we are on the availability of oil cannot help but realize our need for oil is right up there in the life support category like oxygen and food and water and clothing and housing. We the people's real world survival is presently dependent upon the availability of oil.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the business news in this nation, you already know about the coming oil crunch.  The Oil Crunch, by Paul Krugman, spelled it out in the New York Times on May 7, 2004: “Thanks to the mess in Iraq - including a continuing campaign of sabotage against oil pipelines - oil exports have yet to recover to their prewar level, let alone supply the millions of extra barrels each day the optimists imagined. And the fallout from the war has spooked the markets, which now fear terrorist attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, and are starting to worry about radicalization throughout the Middle East. (It has been interesting to watch people who lauded George Bush's leadership in the war on terror come to the belated realization that Mr. Bush has given Osama bin Laden exactly what he wanted.)

Mr. Krugman continued, “Even if things had gone well, however, Iraq couldn't have given us cheap oil for more than a couple of years at most, because the United States and other advanced countries are now competing for oil with the surging economies of Asia…Oil is a resource in finite supply; no major oil fields have been found since 1976, and experts suspect that there are no more to find [emphasis mine]. Some analysts argue that world production is already at or near its peak, although most say that technological progress, which allows the further exploitation of known sources like the Canadian tar sands, will allow output to rise for another decade or two. But the date of the physical peak in production isn't the really crucial question…The question, instead, is when the trend in oil prices will turn decisively upward. That upward turn is inevitable as a growing world economy confronts a resource in limited supply. But when will it happen? Maybe it already has.”

There is no “maybe” about it.

RUSSIAN OIL IS THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Look at what is happening with Russian oil and you will understand that the real powers in this world are much farther along than most people realize in the struggle to see who holds onto the remaining oil resources of the world.

Until recently, most Russian oil was controlled by a company called OAO Yukos, whose majority stockholder was a man named Kikhail Khodorkovsky,

 

Forbes magazine, when announcing that he was the 16th richest man in the world, described Khodorkovsky this way in early 2003: “Onetime Communist Youth League activist now Russia's wealthiest man and chairman of oil giant Yukos. In the early 1990s made a fortune in banking and commodities; in 1995 he bought Yukos from the state at auction for a song.”

But in October of 2003, that story changed dramatically, On October 25, 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint on a Siberian airport runway by the Russian prosecutor general's office, on charges of tax evasion. Shortly thereafter, on October 31, the government further took the unprecedented step of freezing shares of Yukos.  Furthermore, the government began to assess charges of unpaid taxes and penalties that now amount to billions of American dollars.  

The Wall Street Journal on July 2, 2004, explained the situation like this, “His [Khodorkovsky] arrest and the investigations of the company are widely viewed as an effort to put an end to his aggressive moves to challenge the Kremlin in the political realm.”

How was Khodorkovsky challenging “the Kremlin in the political realm?”

Turns out Khodorkovsky had a real fondness for all things American and vice versa.  He had entered into a deal with Mobil Oil that resulted in massive development of Russian oil resources.  While his relationship with American oil was rocky, it was a relationship that led to hundreds of millions of American dollars gaining control of much Russian oil.  Shortly after his arrest, the US State Department intervened and said the arrest was likely to be very damaging to foreign investment in Russia, since it appeared there were "selective" prosecutions occurring against Yukos officials but not against others. A week after the arrest, the Russian government froze Khodorkovsky's shares in Yukos to prevent Khodorkovsky from selling his shares.  American oil interests were clamoring to buy them.  The Russian government move alarmed foreign investors. One very influential Washington figure with close ties to the White House, Richard Perle is reported by Kommersant, a leading Russian periodical, that Russia ought to be expelled from the G-8 over the arrest of Khodorkovsky, and described the campaign against Yukos as "arbitrary, capricious and vindictive."

The Wall Street Journal showed the role American investment played in Russian oil in an article published on July 2, 2004, “A group largely made up of foreign minority shareholders, including Janus Capital Group, Inc. and T. Rowe Price Group Inc., yesterday wrote to Mr. Putin [Russian President] warning that “the effective expropriation of our property in the company [Yuko Oil] would cast great doubt on the protection of private property and the investors’ rights in Russia.”

While it has always been very serious business when oil was involved, we have entered a period unlike any before in history.  July 3, 2004 headline reads, “Police raid Yukos headquarters.”  And with that move, the Russian government effectively nationalized Russian oil.

 

Russia is simply doing in Russia what the USA is doing every place on the planet where we can get away with it.

We should not be surprised to see every nation on the planet organizing to hold on to its oil reserves or die trying.  Without access to oil, the governments will be sitting ducks to the forces of chaos.

The evidence that follows proves the end of oil is finally in sight.  Whereas before, the oil magnates would send out their surveyors and find oceans of oil, the surveyors are coming back today and standing in front of the oil magnates and extending their hands in the universal sign that says empty.  It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the crisis that brings to this planet…And to the United States of America.

WITHOUT OIL AMERICA IMPLODES

Without oil, there are no jobs.  Without jobs there is no prosperity.  In a nation where perhaps ninety per cent of the people are dependent upon jobs to have a place to live and food to eat and clothes to wear (or a government that can provide them with such), the end of jobs raises the specter of chaos that can only be controlled by martial law.  There are many who are totally convinced that the restrictions of civil liberties in this nation today are tests to see how easy it will be to get this generation of American people to accept martial law that comes, not from a local or a State or even the federal government of the USA, but from an International military force.

What we have learned about the American people is chilling or encouraging depending on how much you value liberty.  This generation has stood by and watched a true revolution in law and morality.  In so doing, this generation has demonstrated conclusively that it will, without protest or disruption, accept any kind of regime brought into authority over them, if (and this is a truly historic if) this generation can continue to enjoy the present prosperity and a modicum of the security we presently enjoy.

The “Patriot Act” executive and legislative actions have demonstrated that the American people are willing, even eager, for martial law if that is what it takes to continue to enjoy the historically unprecedented wealth that came from being a citizen of the Greatest Power in the history of the world.

But that experience also spotlights the potentially fatal defect in the American character.  If the people are willing to tolerate even the most brutal control mechanisms to perpetuate their present prosperity, the people would logically tolerate that same brutality to punish the regime that cost them their prosperity.

Think about the preceding paragraph and you will see for yourself the importance of oil.  Without oil no reasonable political leader can see a way to avoid chaos of historically unprecedented proportions in the USA…except through the use of military force so great that the American population retreats silently into their houses like the Iraqi people and the Vietnamese people retreated into theirs.

Oops.  That’s right.   The peoples of those nations didn’t retreat silently at all, did they?  All hell broke loose for the American military forces.  Such is the price the US is willing to pay to keep oil flowing at a price we can control.  The alternative is to face a real insurrection from tens of millions of bankrupt and unemployed American citizens.

Is that an exaggeration?  Follow the train of thought and see for yourself.

GOVERNMENT AND OIL= JOBS

All that is required to keep Americans happy is jobs, well-paying jobs that perpetuate the present standard of living.  Without jobs, all versions of the American Dream disappear because we will be forced to wake up.

Jobs and the American Dream

The American Dream has for two hundred years been the master narrative of the USA.  The American Dream should be more accurately labeled the America myth.

In essence the American Dream is centered on the idea of independent individuals who came into the New World in America and there made jobs for themselves out of the wilderness thereby breaking the chains ordinary people had lived under in the Old World.

The American Dream is a myth because Americans have never been able to create jobs for themselves in this nation.  From the beginning government power was the providing agent for all jobs in this nation.  In the most important questions of all, the questions of survival, the New World was exactly like the Old World.   Individuals never did anything—as individuals—to guarantee survival in the New World.  Always there in the distance—admittedly, sometimes far in the distance—stood the government, ever ready to send in the Calvary to defend the people trying to realize the American Dream.  Without government forces to restrain or destroy the competing forces committed to stopping the people who came to the new world from making a living, death is the only thing individuals found in the “New World.”  In other words, without government force to propel it, the entire historical epoch called the United States of America would have ended with the settlement at Roanoke Island that utterly vanished from the face of the earth. 

But in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the American Dream took hold and continues to this day.

It is easy to see how the American Dream took hold.  It grew almost organically out of the American experience, an experience that made it hard to see the role that government has to play in providing jobs.

During the early days of the USA, it was possible for most individuals to spend most of their lives acting as if their job was not dependent upon the government because the huge majority of people lived and worked on widely dispersed farms that provided a sustainable way of life even when the farm was almost totally separated from the greater American economy.  Subsistence farming created a sense of individual autonomy.  Couple the sense of individual autonomy that came from making a living from subsistence farming with the idea that government was of, by, and for the people and you begin to see how individuals could have believed they created their own jobs and that government, if it had anything to do with their jobs at all, acted as the obedient servant of the individual who had created their own job.

As long as individuals perceived government to be of, by and for the individual, government was the friend, the servant, of the yeoman farmer committed to maintaining the liberty of the individual.

The fly in the ointment created by this myth can be easily seen by those with eyes that see.  The government is not necessarily of, by, and for that mythical yeoman farmer who believes he created his own job.  The government is in fact--in the cold hard reality where the feet of real people hit the hard ground of objective, demonstrable fact--controlled by people who are wholly other than the independent yeoman farmer, people who live and work up there in the State capitol or the Nation’s capitol and only come back where the yeoman farmer or yeoman worker lives when it’s time to renew the American Dream.

Under those circumstances, government can quickly become a deadly fly in the ointment of the individual because those people who make up the government believe themselves to be invested with the right to use the deadly force of government, the force of armed might—guns and bombs to be exact--to maim, kill or enslave those who government decrees to be worthy of such treatment, those the government can, at a moment’s notice, label terrorists or some other label synonymous with the old west term “Outlaw, Wanted Dead or Alive.”

WHERE DOES GOVERNMENT START AND THE INDIVIDUAL END?

Before we go far on that train of thought, we must pull over on a siding and take a long hard look at what we mean when we use the word government and the word individual.  Those terms can become easily confused so that people cannot distinguish between the two.

The two words are easily confused because government is inevitably a creation of individuals.  Since individuals have the power to identify themselves with the things they create (psychologists call the process reification), the individual who believes him/her self to have created government almost inevitably sees government as indistinguishable from him/her self.  And as long as the individual is in fact the government--say in the situation that occurred in ancient history where the father and husband in a family was the government in that family--there is no danger of confusion.

But it must be seen and admitted that the huge majority of individuals today are not the people who comprise the government, all protestations by politicians to the contrary notwithstanding. 

Only in the American myth does the individual live as the government.  In the reality where everyone lives and moves and has their being, it is the majority that is the government.  And that present arrangement is as fragile a fact as any in reality.  All it takes for that fact to disappear is a minority with arms and the will to use them who decides to stop pandering to the majority—say like the military establishment in the USA.

Which leads us to the myth of majority rule.  While the majority might be given the privilege of making government decisions on occasion, all ideas about majority rule are a myth insofar as those ideas imply that the majority is the Hegemon. The Hegemon is the Great Power and the Great Power is the people who have dominant military arms—guns, bombs, WMD, etc.--and are willing to use them.  While the great majority of American citizens are clearly willing to have guns used in their defense, they no longer have the guns themselves and even if the majority had the courage to use them--which given the bloated condition of the body politic is highly unlikely—the majority lacks the means to do so.  The majority is protected only as long as the majority is prepared to perpetuate the agenda of the plutocrats who actually possess the reins of government power. 

This situation is not unique in history.  Surely the plutocrats awaken at night in the cold sweat of horrible nightmares about the growing mercenary warrior class, like the Roman Praetorian Guard, that is growing within the borders of the USA, a warrior class capable of bringing a new Night of the Long Knives to the USA.

As unpleasant as the foregoing is, that solemn narrative is the foundational reality upon which all government theory must rest if it is to be anything other than deceptive propaganda designed to sing lullalies to the sleeping cattle.

But it must be granted that for most people in this nation lullabies instead of lullalies can still be sung.  The individual can identify with the government because the people with the guns and the will to use them—the true Hegemon--presently pander to the majority.  If an individual is willing to subsume him/her self within the thing called the majority today (and all the attendant government laws and policies), that individual can find a reasonable basis for believing he/she is the government.

With the foregoing in view, it is now possible to focus on the main difference between the concept government and the concept individual.  Whereas government is by definition authorized to use deadly force to carry out the will of the government, individuals are allowed to use deadly force only in accordance with the rules established by government.  If the individual finds him/her self in opposition to the rules established by government, the logic of this present world requires the individual to always be trumped by government, even trumped to death if necessary.

Think about the preceding ideas and you will see where terrorists—who by definition are always a minority without official government sanction--come from.

TODAY NOBODY CONTROLS THEIR OWN JOB

The point?  The individual is now, perhaps for the first time in history, clearly perceivable as an abstraction, and it is government that is the real thing that gives the individual its meaning.  Face it, you are no longer an individual, you are a peasant, utterly dependent upon the land lord, and the Land Lord’s name is government.  And government is way badder than any in the history of the world because government has been released from all but the latest version of stare decisis--from all preexisting written documents like Constitutions and Scripture--and given carte blanc to make law up as it goes along.

You might think you can flee and live “off the grid” but you can’t.  It’s way past 1984.  Big Brother has arrived.

The point?  It’s time we all stood up and admitted the American myth, even as myth, is no longer relevant to today’s world.  Today it’s easy to see that people are totally dependent upon government for their jobs.  When people left the farm and moved into towns to work in factories and the jobs that serve them, all illusions of independence and self-sustaining labor disappeared and were replaced by the corporate hive-think that is both the paradigm for and the end result of what society calls government today.

Surprised?  You shouldn’t be.  It’s always been that way: you just let the American Dream take your eyes off reality.

When Pharaoh ruled it was easy to understand reality because Pharoah owned all the land.  He owned because He ruled.  He ruled because He made the rules and He who makes the rules owns the land.

Once it was easy to see how dependent people were upon government because the primary responsibility of government involved the protection of the land.  Literally the land.  Since most people were farmers, the land was the place where their jobs were focused.  It is only in the last century that the role of land in our way of life began to change.  Until then, everyone had understood that agriculture and the land that provided it was that which provided the way of life to every person in the, uh, land.  When government protected the land, government was actually protecting jobs.  In an agricultural world, where every peasant was actually a farmer, and there were virtually no jobs except agriculture, it was easy to see that the Landlord was the actual guarantor of jobs and the survival those jobs provided.

But in America, the New World, all that changed.  Here it was easy to believe that there were no Landlords.  The American Dream seemed to be a real possibility because here land seemed to be an apparently infinite commodity and almost as cheap as…dirt.  If the price of land started rising, all one had to do to possess it was “Go West, Young Man; Go West.”  And west we the people went.

But those days are long gone.  In one generation after the Second World War, we moved off the land and into corporate America.

Land is no longer even a factor figured in the jobs equation for the USA. 

Today, whether you’ve thought much about it or not, everybody knows that providing jobs is JOB ONE of government.  One of George W. Bush’s campaign themes in 2004 is about the fact that he has “created 1.1 million jobs since August…”  The Democratic candidate is wringing his hands because he understands the pivotal power the government’s present success in providing jobs gives to the Republican candidate.

I say all that to say this:

If you start thinking seriously about the role of oil in today’s world, you find yourself in an unending circle.  Everywhere you look you see that oil provides the actual infrastructure upon which everything in the modern world depends. 

CONCLUSION

There is a theological component to this story that would tempt Native Americans to laugh in vengeful delight were they not, like all of us, totally dependent upon the availability of oil.

The Native American theology always held that all things are infused with life and with consciousness.  At the root of the early Native American sense of moral superiority over the Europeans was an awareness of the fact that the encroaching Europeans were seemingly oblivious to the sentient character of the earth.  The Indian took great pride in the knowledge that they understood that the earth itself was a living, conscious being who was offended when people did not treat it/her/him properly.  When they saw farmers ripping open the sod of the Great Plains, or more especially when they saw gold seekers ripping deep into the earth in frenzied gold lust, they experienced a sense of moral superiority and believed they had every right to expect the earth to rise up and wreak vengeance on the lustful, earth-ransacking European interlopers.

Before you decide this article is too weird to read since I’ve just jumped from an analysis of oil to a discussion of the Native American Indian, focus on the possibility that there is a sense in which it can be seen that oil is the earth’s life blood.  Like blood, it lies underneath the surface.  Like blood, it is a liquid.  Like blood, a significant portion of the life forms around are utterly dependent upon it.

Could it be that the Native American might have some insight into reality and that our decision to suck the earth dry of its oil could be akin to a tick’s decision to suck out the blood of its host?  Could it be that the earth tolerates us digging around on the skin of the earth, experiencing it more as a pleasurable scratching or massage, but when we start sucking the very life blood out of the earth, might it be that the earth ceases to tolerate us and begins to think about treating us like a tick?

Interesting as those speculations might be, this is not a time for speculation.  It is a time for raw, hard, material self-evident fact.

The USA will not achieve control of the world’s oil supply without enormous cost.  Are you willing to pay that price?

It is obvious that the USA has taken the responsibility to fight to the death the Muslim Brotherhood that embodies the ancient Muslim vision of, if not world autonomy, at least real Sovereignty for the international Nation of Islam.  But they are not the only potential enemy.  While no longer Super Powers like the USA, nations like France and Russia and China and, the list goes on and on, have illusions of sovereignty that create great power for potential resistance to the USA’s world hegemony should we feel the need for “their” oil resources.  On top of that, the USA is being watched by an International Body that has aspirations to replace the USA as the world’s Hegemon, the world’s final Great Power.  Any of those facts could suddenly challenge the USA with mortal danger.

As the USA goes about, shall we say, “requisitioning” the world’s oil, we have already been branded by the Muslim Brotherhood as a thief.  To date, the American people have not paused in the face of such Muslim judgments.  We have simply placed a puppet regime in Iraq and stood back waiting to see what the world will do.

Here’s what the world will inevitably do: As we move forward in bringing the world’s oil resources under US control, it stands to reason that we the people stand a very good chance of being branded by world opinion and the emerging International Body—the United Nations--as nothing more than a common criminal, a thief to be exact, whose present actions in the world provide a perfect rationalization for forcing the people of the USA to lose that which they presently think they own.

Since I am a Christian, I only give passing notice to Native American theological speculation about immanent sentience in the earth, and I do not look to international or national government bodies to define right and wrong for me.  And the battles of international sovereignty while not beside the point are not really THE critical question.

 

From my point of view, the critical question is not about who knows what or who has aspirations about ownership but about who actually owns the deed to the world and the world’s resources today.  As a Christian, what I believe, and what I am honor bound to act like I know, is what Holy Scripture makes clear, “The earth is the LORD’S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.”

When I think about the present oil crunch and the coming earthquakes it will cause, I look at what we the people have been doing to the Lord God revealed in Holy Scripture, not merely at what we have been doing to His earth.

We have legalized murder and we have legalized adultery and covetousness and idolatry of all types, and, as this article demonstrates, we the people of the USA are on the verge of legalizing theft.  Where will it end?

Without repentance, it is bound to end in the most horrible story in history.

To expect God to continue to replenish the life blood of earth when we the people have decided to not only ignore His Law but to replace it with a law directly the opposite of His Law is to expect the impossible.  We live in a generation that prides itself on believing that nothing is impossible.  But some things are impossible.  The impossible is found when people expect God to lie.  God has said He will not be mocked.  To mock God’s law by replacing it with the opposite is to mock God.  To expect God to do anything but destroy us under those circumstances is to expect the impossible.

When I ponder what we the people have done to the Lord, what I see causes me to weep with sounds of weeping I never made when I was a child and never imagined I would make when I was a man.  I weep with such horrible sounds because I see with my own eyes that within my lifetime a horrible desecration of God and God’s things has occurred, a desecration that was once simply unthinkable in the United States of America.  But most of all I weep because I see that those people who claim to belong to God will do nothing to stop the desecration until the evil around us creates evil impossible to bear.

 

One of the saddest lines ever written in any American government document was the line ratified on July 4th, 1776 by the delegates to the Second Continental Congress.  In the Declaration of Independence, they said, “…accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

 

I look at that message and I weep because of a prophesy God led me to issue about two years ago.  I documented the prophesy in a film I made called The Buffalo Warning.  The prophesy was that God had once issued a moratorium wherein he had given the American people the opportunity to repent from sin against Him.  But if we did not repent God would lift the moratorium and a time of punishment would come to the USA.  What made the prophesy a prophesy rather than simple speculation was I defined a time frame and conditions that must be met for God to understand that repentance had occurred.  Obviously the Buffalo Warning was ignored except by a small group of people.

 

At the time I knew God was going to bring His vengeance but I had no insight into how God would wreak His vengeance.  When the Iraqi War began, I realized the timing of that event coincided with the parameters I had been led to define in the Buffalo Warning.  When SARS broke out within that same time frame, I knew the effects of the moratoriums lifting had begun.  But at the time I did not see that the Iraqi War was also evidence that the end of oil was nigh and that the earth itself was to run dry in the fulfillment of God’s righteous judgment against this generation.

 

With the Lord God Creator of the Universe, even though the end might be nigh, there is always hope for those who will turn from their wicked ways and seek His forgiveness.  My prayer and the reason I sent this message to you is in hopes that you will join me in demonstrating to a lost and dying planet what repentance looks like up close and personal.

 

If we do this, we might find that God’s coming wrath is turned away.

********* Reserves and Resources

Looking at the bottom row in the table below, it appears that we have some time before we reach the critical halfway point for oil production.  We've used up over  900 Gb globally, but we still have 1500 Gb remaining.  Unfortunately, according to the world-renowned oil geologist Dr Colin Campbell, these totals are deceptive.  They're deceptive because the major oil-exporting nations have major incentives for exaggerating their estimates of reserves: the more reserves they can claim, the more oil they can pump.

Furthermore, the recent story about Shell Oil Companies shenanigans with their accounting proves that some oil companies might be simply lying about a significant percentage of their proven reserves.  News reports said, “Shell shock" has hit the British Isles. The almost 100-year-old British-Dutch oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell, with 115,000 workers worldwide and an annual turnover of 35 billion euros, has had to acknowledge, in a series of reports, that it has pulled the wool over the eyes of its shareholders and creditors for years…About one-fourth of the oil and gas reserves which have been reported in Shell's books, have existed only in the fantasy of the members of the board.”  This article appeared in the May 7, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, by Lothar Komp

 

Table 1. Leading Oil Countries' Production, Reserves and Resources in 1995
(In Billions of Barrels = Gb)
 

Country

Cumulative
Production

Reserves

Undiscovered
Resources

Reserves &
Resources

 

 

 

 

 

Saudi Arabia

71.5

261.2

41.0

302.2

Russia

92.6

100.0

68.0

168.0

Iraq

22.8

100.0

45.0

145.0

Iran

42.9

93.0

22.0

115.0

UA Emirates

15.1

98.2

7.0

105.2

Kuwait

27.6

97.5

3.0

100.5

Venezuela

47.3

83.3

17.0

100.3

United States

165.8

50.7

49.0

99.7

Mexico

20.5

50.4

37.0

87.4

China

18.8

24.0

48.0

72.0

Kazakhstan

3.2

17.3

26.0

43.3

Canada

16.1

5.1

33.0

38.1

Libya

19.0

22.8

8.0

30.8

Nigeria

15.5

17.9

9.0

26.9

Norway

6.3

11.3

13.0

24.3

Indonesia

15.2

5.8

10.0

15.8

United Kingdom

12.3

4.6

11.0

15.6

Algeria

9.1

9.2

2.0

11.2

Totals

621.6

1052.3

449.0

1501.3

Data source: Encyclopedia Britannica, which adapted them from Oil & Gas Journal and US Geological Survey data. The data for these 18 countries represent 94% of the world's oil reserves and 82% of its undiscovered resources.

Note: Dr Colin Campbell calculates that over 300 Gb of reserve claims are spurious (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, UA Emirates, Kuwait, Venezuela). He also states that much of the undiscovered resources are in fact "unconventional oil" (tar sands, oil shales and other currently unrecoverable resources) and will be much more expensive to extract than "conventional" reserves, and therefore should not be considered as equivalent to reserves.


Campbell calls these overstated reserves "paper reserves" or "political reserves."  He estimates that fully 30% of stated global oil reserves are in fact of the paper/political variety.  Furthermore, he claims that a large percentage of "undiscovered resources" should not even be considered resources because they are not economically recoverable now, and never will be.

After subtracting for "political reserves" and "unrecoverable resources," Campbell comes up with about 900 Gb remaining.  But of course these 900 Gb are not the same as the 900 Gb that we've already burned.   In geologist's terminology, a good part of them are much "tighter and deeper," that is, they are much harder to find and much harder to extract and refine.

 Timeline

• 1857 -- Romania produces 2,000 barrels of oil, marking the beginning of the modern oil industry.

• 1859, Aug. 25 -- Edwin L. Drake strikes oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania

• 1862 -- First commercial oil production in Canada, also 1863 in Russia.

• 1862 -- Most widely used lamp fuel (camphene) taxed in US at aprox. $1 a gallon; kerosene taxed at 10 cent per gallon. (Kovarik, 1997)

• 1863 -- John D. Rockefeller starts the Excelsior Refinery in Cleveland, Ohio.

• 1879 -- US Geological Survey formed in part because of fear of oil shortages.

• 1882 -- Institute of Mining Engineers estimates 95 million barrels of oil remain. With 25 milliion barrels per year output, "Some day the cheque will come back indorsed no funds, and we are approaching that day very fast," Samuel Wrigley says. (Pratt, p. 124).

• 1901 -- Spindletop gusher in Texas floods US oil market.

• 1906 -- Fears of an oil shortage are confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Representatives of the Detroit, Board of Commerce attended hearings in Washington and told a Senate hearing that car manufacturers worried Ònot so much [about] cost as ... supply.Ó

• 1919, Scientific American notes that the auto industry could no longer ignore the fact that only 20 years worth of U.S. oil was left.  “The burden falls upon the engine. It must adapt itself to less volatile fuel, and it must be made to burn the fuel with less waste.... Automotive engineers must turn their thoughts away from questions of speed and weight... and comfort and endurance, to avert what ... will turn out to be a calamity, seriously disorganizing an indispensable system of transportation.”

• 1920 -- David White, chief geologist of USGS, estimates total oil remaining in the US at 6.7 billion barrels. "In making this estimate, which included both proved reserves and resources still remaining to be discovered, White conceded that it might well be in error by as much as 25 percent." (Pratt, p. 125. Emphasis added).

• 1925 -- US Commerce Dept. says that while U.S. oil production doubled between 1914 and 1921, it did not kept pace with fuel demand as the number of cars increased.

• 1928 -- US analyst Ludwell Denny in his book "We Fight for Oil" noted the domestic oil shortage and says international diplomacy had failed to secure any reliable foreign sources of oil for the United States. Fear of oil shortages would become the most important factor in international relations, even so great as to force the U.S. into war with Great Britain to secure access to oil in the Persian Gulf region, Denny said.

• 1926 -- Federal Oil Conservation Board estimates 4.5 billion barrels remain.

• 1930 -- Some 25 million American cars are on the road, up from 3 million in 1918.

• 1932 -- Federal Oil Conservation Board estimates 10 billion barrels of oil remain.

• 1944 -- Petroleum Administrator for War estimates 20 billion barrelsof oil remain.

• 1950 -- American Petroleum Institute says world oil reserves are at 100 billion barrels. (See Jean Laherre, Forecast of oil and gas supply)

• 1956 -- M.King Hubbard predicts peak in US oil production by 1970.

• 1966 - 1977 -- 19 billion barrels added to US reserves, most of which was from fields discovered before 1966. (As M.A. Adelman notes: "These fields were no gift of nature. They were a growth of knowledge, paid for by heavy investment.")

• 1973 -- Oil price spike; supply restrictions due to Midde Eastern politics.

• 1978 -- Petroleos de Venezuela announces estimated unconventional oil reserve figure for Orinoco heavy oil belt at between three and four trillion barrels. (More recent public estimates are in the one trillion range).

• 1979 -- Oil price spike; supply restrictions due to Midde Eastern politics.

• 1980 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 648 billion barrels

• 1993 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 999 billion barrels

• 2000 -- Remaining proven oil reserves put at 1016 billion barrels.

Timeline, © 2003 By Bill Kovarik
bill@environmentalhistory.org

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