It's the Oil, Slick.

What the ROW grasps, but the citizens of the United States of Americonned fails to see:

 ...."what good would be the dreams about liberty, democracy, or other sorts of ideals, if we failed to get our share of a product for which there was no subsititute? All over the world the British were grabbing the territories in which there was any chance of oil; they were holding these as reserves and buying our American supply for immediate use - it was a deliberate policy."



After reading the article in yesterday's NYT Sunday magazine, "WAIT. I've got 80 Grand in Debt", by Adam Davidson, I couldn't help but notice that, although the timing of the start of the decline of the middle class in the USA corresponds exactly with the arrival in the US of peak oil Production, there is nary a word in the article on the central part that oil and its flow has had on the economic well-being of this most oil-thirsty of nations. The word "oil" isn't mentioned once.

This is a manifestation of the incredible power of denial, such that an entire society's access to a commodity so vital to the functioning of the most basic of endeavors and is completely dependent on the availability of a single resource, isprovided so smoothly that nobody understands the vital part it plays in their lives. And whereas most people would assume that everyone in the US is completely aware of the nexus between  our standard of living and the flow of oil not only to our own country but to the vitality of the economies with which our own interacts, and thus would be, if not understood, at least grasped as a serious link, they would be mistaken.


"Pain at the Pump" is always caused by big oil companies' gouging their consumers, never by the fact that those companies, like Shell, for example that shelled out enormous amounts of cash together with Total, ENI and Exxon for fracking exploration in eastern European countries such as Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, and also calling it a loss for the billions spent on the Kashagan field in Kazakhstan, that is still locked in the ground because of the SO2 that eats through the pipes if the least amount of air leaks into them, this looks like it will necessitate the complete replacement of two years' worth of pipe laying. The situation is getting so bad that fossil fuel companies are buying back their own stock, as that gets a better return than  using the Capex to look for more resources to burn.

Yet to even mention this as being even part of the cause of the decline of the middle class that is resulting in adults moving back in with their parents, saddled with so much debt that the interest alone is so burdensome that the debt keeps growing even when it is being paid down, since a payment was missed which resulted in a penalty AND an interest rate increase, leaves a vast pool of  cash; $1.2trillion slushing, sloshing, slouching around.

But since capital doesn't stay put, the trillions of dollars that student debt creates out of thin air gets "securitised" which every one should know by now, but is blissfully ignorant of instead, means that it frees that money up to be used as thought it exists now, on enterprises that are in no way capable of paying their own way, nor will they ever be, and then when the so-called securities are eventually proved worthless, they are simply bought up by the central bank, much like the ECB buying up sovereign bonds from insolvent States, and the citizen is used to do, guess what?, make good on those debts that were used to fund the fracking revolution that the article naturally never mentions, because there's no connection- how could there be?- between getting students to invest in their future, when they don't have one, by taking out enormous loans that the job they're training for will never allow them to pay back, all backed by the US taxpayer who as in the subprime debt debacle, will be bilked for it when the wall of debt collapses onto them, but reap none of the rewards a normal investor gets, but who, in order to make the investment in the first place, has to be assured of a government bail out upfront.

It is this dynamic that gives the KKK its stranglehold over the entire country, and by extension, the world. Remember, like the acronym to which it owes its genesis, the Kamikaze Kapitalist Kultur holds itself to be superior to you and you simply don't understand the equations that demands a War-Mart worker to expend more money in gas, insurance and upkeep just on the vehicle to get her to and from work than she'll ever receive in pay. So the fact that the amount needed to expend on food, insurance and upkeep for the family and herself is simply not anything any employer need concern themselves with, as those are simply externalities, expenses to slough off onto the State.

 Alright alright, I'm just ranting now, but it does feel like people in other counties, so called 3'rd world, even, understand the dynamics of, if not of securitisation and how, when it is backed by government guarantees, it is in reality a tax that is surreptitiously imposed on the bulk of those paying for it without allowing them any input as to how its vast amassing of capital is used, even though it is often used against the very workers who make it possible in the first place, at least they have an understanding of how the ocean of oil on which modern economies keep themselves afloat is absolutely essential to fuel the military adventurism known as Imperialism.

But Americans? Not so much. They prefer to harbor the same idiotic infantile fantasies of "Exceptionalism" that all other, although usually of a more homogeneous ethnic or religious makeup, Imperialists entertain. We have been sorely misled by those same universities to whom we funnel such enormous amounts of dollars, all of which are really taxpayer liabilities, in order for them to deliberately misinform our youth and, at the same time, indenture them.

And although this is another product of the Reaganomics that has destroyed capitalism and turned int into a form of Centrally controlled, undemocratic method of hamstringing choice, as it's already been made for you, you'll find no discussion of in the NYT or in the opinion of that puffed up moron, Krugman. Because, as the KKK well knows, securitisation of bonds that are government-guaranteed guarantees only one thing: that the "free-for-all" marketplace, guaranteed as to the return on and of their investment, will then leverage those government guaranteed loans as a bulwark on which to build castles in the air of malinvestment for which they know they have no risk, as the risk has been assumed by the electorate, but from which they will reap all the rewards, even if, as in the case of student loans, the products that are being sold are not only not good for the consumers purchasing them, but actually does them harm and thereby reduces the likelihood of those consumers being able to repay them.

Something like selling, for zero down, vehicles that have a faulty ignition switch that results in the death of the person to whom you made the loan to buy the car in which your company's faulty engineering has doomed them to an early death. But since that loan was securitised and bought by someone else, what do you care if they can pay it back or not? You got your bonus, and they got a car they could otherwise not have afforded, so everybody's happy. After all, if we'll cook the planet in order to drive a car, wouldn't we risk our lives just for the privilege, the thrill, the zoom-zoom, of driving a car for a few months or years? Isn't that worth it? You bet it is!