Bespeak Oil Production: President Plump Builds his Wall after All. (And Aimed the Economy Right At It).

Our resilient economy is as fragile as a cloisonné vase, yet has been manhandled as though it were as hardy as a cement trough. Currency wars, trade wars, oil wars, embargoes, sanctions, mountains of debt, derivatives, income gulfs wider than the Pacific Ocean, money manufactured as though it were poker chips, asset prices actively and openly propped up by the same people who insist on "Free Market" Capitalism, such that only those already in possession of the nose-bleed-priced stocks and housing lock everyone else out, all of which is aimed at supporting the only thing that everyone agrees we should stop doing as of yesterday: relying on Petroleum, Coal and Natural Gas to fuel the entire edifice of the modern hyper-militarized Corponationalist State.

In other words, it is appropriate that as we head toward our collision with the future, one that requires 2020 vision, we have built a 3-D world: a Globalization that is based on Deception, Delusion, and Dissemblance; Distortion, Divestment and Dissonance; Dishonesty, Dross and Duplicity. Thus do we have a slowing global economy ignored as nay-sayers in the US are blamed for the incipient recession, not the tariffs unilaterally pummeling free trade; likewise it couldn't possibly be the deliberate attacks against the Chinese/US trade deficit that has been bringing US consumers, resulting from the Bush/Reagan-era deconstruction of the US economy that bartered low prices to offset the lower wages of a service economy; nor is there any chance that those Chinese currency manipulations, accusations leveled against the Communist Super Power created by that bastion of Capitalism, the US, could be the result of relying on the only Communist State in the WTO to create the credit expansion necessary to pull the "Free World" out of its self-inflicted 2008 free fall.  The free fall itself the comeuppance inflicted on an economy built on the gas fumes of the internationalization of fraud, toxic security peddling, and collusion. This delicious irony, whereby the last remaining Communist Super power not only "gives them enough rope", but uses their own hemp to braid it, never having been mentioned in the first place, has now been completely forgotten.

The real reasons of the coming collapse are easy to see because President Plump is following the same template as his Republican predecessor. You know, that guy whose name you never hear (it's always Obama this, and Obama that, never GW Bush, the man who drove the entire global economy to the precipice of the abyss that came very close to toppling the entire edifice).

Bush used coal as one of his underlying energy strategies, doubling, in the face of a rapidly warming world, our nation's reliance on coal to generate electricity and process what was sold to the American public as "Green Fuel", ethanol made from food crops. Although never mentioned by his opponent in the Presidential race, Plump's accusations of a War  on Coal were possible only because of  the GW Bush administration's use of coal as the major fuel for the electrification of the United States, building more coal-fired power plants in eight years than had been built in the previous twenty and bringing the total from less than a thousand to more than 1430: a new coal-fired power plant for every week the eight-year administration held office. This was actuated because the president from oil country gave his buddies free hand to manipulate the price of oil to such levels it would have cratered the economy, so before they jacked it up to skim off the bonanza into their own bank accounts, US electricity had to first be made to run on a different fuel, the one the coal industry insiders hired him to implement: Coal. Quelle surprise!

"We have enough coal in the ground to supply the energy needs of the US economy for the next 200 years" ( at least). The small proviso left out of that statement being, "at our current usage". Then that usage doubled. Meanwhile imports of firrin erl just kept climbing. This to fuel the thirst for heavier and  heavier transport modules. Lumbering vehicles large enough to accommodate living room-sized furniture or a soccer team, yet 98% of the time piloted by one lone occupant, soon filled the highways and the driveways of McMansions. This is the empty prosperity the MAGA meme is striving so mightily to recapture.

The chosen poison this time 'round is the oil obtained by fracturing the landscape to hardscrabble and releasing its locked-in oil. What it also sets loose are those Freedom Molecules floating up in such abundance they promise to blow up the entire operation, so are flared, thus creating two more Freed Molecules, CO2 and H2O. The Milton Friedman Molecules. Because, investment in fracturing was not as robust as what was needed, so the Fed simply created the investment dollars, recycled via Goldman and the other dealers of sovereign debt, to their own hedge funds and countless others, that poured their free money into the Plump administration equivalent of the coal boondoggle, fracturing. Commonly referred to by its industry-sponsored nick-name, "fracking". But there is no such word. It had to be made up. Yet it carries no extra baggage than its commonplace name: Fracking just sounds better than fracturing. And the magnitude of its operation is on the same scale of malinvestment as the building of the overcapacity in housing during the disastrous Bush reign of error, albeit this time completely removed from public purview.

Multiply this by tens of thousands:
 These are not homes, but they are responsible for the lack of housing.

The sheer size of these earth-fracturing operations are breath-taking. What are equivalent in size and resource allocation to creating entire suburbs cut from new cloth now pepper the landscape of the West. In Texas and Oklahoma, Utah, North Dakota and New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and California, entire new "towns" have sprung up. Well-pads and drill points, water systems to provide the liquid infusion of chemical soup into the ground at high pressure, and roads sturdy enough to bear the heavy traffic of big rigs and sand-laden trucks, all connected via a network of pipelines resembling those underlying entire cities, and that last ironic twist: flaring towers to burn off the natural gas stock that may have been able to power a future. Or offset the tremendous combustion of fossil fuels required to build this other-worldy landscape.

Wonder where all the infrastructure dollars go?
Heavy equipment such as this requires heavy duty investment for roads in the middle of nowhere.

And just as Bush created a coal infrastructure that paid off his buddies handsomely even while condemning the rest of the nation for whose benefit he swore to run the country, the fossil fuel infrastructure the administration is now building, the basket into which he has piled all our eggs, this assuredly losing bet, has the same future, as can be divined by the corollary infrastructure rising in tandem with it: Multi-billion dollar Petrochemical plants built on cheap credit for which we will pay a heavy price for decades, just as we are still paying for the Bush-era breakneck coal build-out that set the stage the opiate crisis in coal country.

President Plump learned well. Taking his cue from Dubya by building out an industry slated to earn a fast buck for cronies yet destined for the dustbin of history well before it pays its promised dividends to any but a few insiders, and leaving the rest of the economy to pay the hangover of intractable, burdensome debt. All in order to take immediate advantage of natural gas in unnatural abundance, by using the tremendous oversupply from fracturing the earth at such breakneck speed that even the resultant exudate has no market at any but break-even prices, in this, our "market-based" economy, by fronting for the industry bent on finishing the job by covering the earth in plastic.

 In complete disregard for anything that comes after him, such as the multifarious health problems resulting in microplastics in every drop we drink or bite we eat, President Plump is riding the economy he claims he has made great, right into the same impediment his Republican predecessor aimed it at: a wall. One built of burgeoning supply right on the boundary with a desert of demand. Thus making it the only promise he made to his base that he'll keep. He promised to build a wall and he damn well has. And as he's already admitted, after remarking that no one really believed Mexico would pay for his wall, least of all him, it's a wall US citizens will get the bill for. They will be the ones paying for it. And they will pay dearly.