Let me
say this a different way:
Some of the conservatives are correct: if you announced that the USA was allowing the drilling of every ounce of oil under its land, gas prices would drop tomorrow while the speculators scrambled and if it actually happened, prices of the world market would slowly decrease until, like...
anything happened in the Middle East, we realized China was buying
even more (and now cheaper) oil, or the wells went dry.
But here's where it gets hinky, and I heard direct evidence of this on Columbus 610AM WTVN with Chuck Douglas: While Chuck stuck to the potential of drilling as potentially lowering the gas price, he gave callers a blind crazy license to say, basically "We've got enough oil and natural gas and coal within our shores to carry the USA forever and FUCK foreign energy!" Of course without even questioning them let alone correcting them.
Here's the problem: The same ignorant goons saying "We own our oil!" don't quite realize that it is because of the entrepreneurial free market, the "government out of business" that they tout that
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
Drilling companies pay the US a fee for exploratory - then drilling - rights. They own the crude they drill and will sell it not to the US (but we needs it, precious) but to the highest bidder who in turn sells the next product down all the way to gas, everyone getting the highest price on the market. We will buy it off the same market as China, even if it was drilled from my Cincinnati, OH yard and I was on the drilling team.
The ONLY way these right wing goons saying "We own our oil!" could be right is if the United States Government got its hands into the drilling business, the oil business, the refining business, the gasoline and petrol products - Hell, let's call it TAINT-OIL - and then we can cut off the rest of the world and TAINT-OIL can keep and distribute and control the flow of the fuel ("Hell, you can be Joe Cocaine with it") - and our livelihoods.
[Pause: You get this, right? The right wing is basically calling for eschewing free markets and governmental control of our energy resources.]
So how do so many people, people who don't want "the nanny state" thinking about talking about looking at them sideways, NOT understand this basic fact, this absolute catastrophe of logic?
Because people like Chuck Douglas and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh let them. Because while these show hosts should (and probably do based on their measured speech) know better, realize that the USA will never drill and take our own oil -- those hosts, their livelihood, their base, their ratings are activated, are generated, are receiving salvation from the Lord Above from ignorant people who want nothing more than to yell at the radio about how Obama is screwing them.
Ironically, would the US Government open TAINT-OIL, those talk show hosts would be on the front lines of WTF! And, ironically, Obama cares more for these gas-price-cursing AM-drooling myrmidons than any of the hosts do.
Ignorance abounds. I would say Obama needs to push this basic reality, but it would be discounted because Obama said it.
So I leave it to you: How do we explain to the indoctrinated AM listeners that their basic beliefs in the free market and governmental control are keeping them from getting them cheap oil?
(Note: I am adamantly opposed to our government getting into the oil industry. That would be a BAD idea; Oil conglomerates need to be checked, but NOT controlled.)
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