Relax! Trump Says Oil Will “Drop Like a Rock”

Numerous oil tankers at sea are being hit, and not just in the PG.  The Black Sea cauldron is burning oil and coming under attack.  Saudi Arabia can’t get its oil out via land or sea, thanks to two wars and several bad choices.  Even the Port of Haijaira, a saving grace of a very odd set of UAE borders, is under the gun and vulnerable.  Ukraine, which gets its surveillance, target acquisition, and operational guidance from the NATO, the CIA and MI-6, has stepped up its assault on Russian refineries.  Mother Nature in the Gulf of America is also weighing in this weekend.  Are all of the random refinery explosions just bad luck, or a hidden gift to Washington? NUTRAVISION - Eye Heal... Buy New $11.39 (as of 04:11 UTC - Details)

Trump publicly complains about Zelensky’s targeting “choices” – and blames Zelensky for global diesel shortages – even as everyone involved is fully aware that Washington DC controls those decisions, and facilitates their execution. Trump frequently criticizes Biden, but never for blowing up three of four Nordstream 2 gas pipelines on September 26^th, 2022. In fact, he took credit for that himself, with his first term sanctions on Nord Stream construction, sanctions Biden repealed before then telling the world he would punitively “end it.”  Washington seems to be managing global energy supply, transport and refining, controlling supply to drive up price and manage trade shocks.  It’s a re-envisioned OPEC, as hinted at in last year’s US National Security Strategy.

Trump’s first term was a political pivot from Obama playing warmonger and assassin, with Hillary Clinton his American Cassandra sincerely asking, on behalf of empire, what difference the truth makes.  Trump’s second term, however, brought him to heel.  The deep state/the ruling elite had learned it had nothing to fear from a fake populist; his Zionist blackmailers and pals walk ever more openly throughout American halls of power.  US wars at home and abroad grew during the autocratic Biden administration; Trump, beer held elsewhere, signed hundreds of executive orders unilaterally declaring economic or kinetic war, rejecting the autopen on moral grounds as he buried the Constitution.

While no energy insider, Trump is an eager consumer of big beautiful “strategies” to make money, and he thinks of the US till very much as his own, in a uniquely charming fascist way.  Trump “buying” USG percentages of chip manufacturers and shipbuilders and “super” intelligence is nothing new in American history.  Only his childlike delight in it surprises anyone.  Americans may worry about government-centric bubblelicious financing of AI – but the new AI companies led by modern weirdos parallel the paths of their predecessors at least as far back as 1949.  It’s the natural evolution of the military industrial congressional complex that alarmed Eisenhower with its permanent preference for publicly financed wars, its contempt for the Constitution, and any limits on the power of the state. AirSquares Airpod Clea... Buy New $12.99 (as of 04:11 UTC - Details)

The story behind the story of the CIA employee discovered with hundreds of gold bars and millions in cash in his home in northern Virginia is instructive.  CIA Officer David Rush created and executed massive fraud and theft through fake companies, imaginary organizations and fraudulent requisition paperwork.  One wonders when this individual had time to actually do the work he was hired to do, and how many other David Rushes we might find throughout the federal and federal contractor landscape busily doing their busy work and planning for their own brighter future, taxpayers and national security be damned. Not to pick on government contractors, but no doubt the story of how F-35 parts ended up in China (and remain there) marks a similar unfocused and short-sighted performance.  Rally, what difference does it make?

Legal, administrative and bureaucratic safeguards in the CIA ,and throughout the USG, appear to be spotty to non-existent; systemic accountability is completely absent. American taxpayers, workers, retirees and student loan recipients pay trillions each year to the federal government, and the latest adventures of David Rush, et al, are a very real part of the deadly federal iceberg we rarely get to see.

Trump himself and millions of federal employees and contractors view the federal government as their playground.  Like the president, beneficiaries of federal jobs seem unwilling to take responsibility for the outright theft and astonishing waste and fraud inside the system; Like the President, they avoid getting involved in the exposure of actual crimes and wrongdoing, whether petty, grand, or Constitutional.

Back to oil, and the games our government is playing vis a vis energy.  Both houses of Congress have repeatedly, including during Biden and Trump administration, promoted a NOPEC bill “No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act.”  It continually fails, in part because American oil lobbies oppose it.  Biden and Trump publicly sought lower oil prices, but their overarching actions – starting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, attacking Iran under the cover of diplomat meetings ostensibly being held to eliminate nuclear weapons that Iran never had – seemed designed to produce exactly the opposite – a US-initiated and managed limit on global supplies of both natural gas and petroleum, thus ensuring higher prices.  The global BRICS sanctions regime and the coup in Venezuela both meant less oil would be brought onto the market without US “permission” and that the US could increasingly cartelize and price this sector. Nutrim Oat Bran Powder... Buy New $25.26 (as of 04:11 UTC - Details)

The White House, like OPEC in 1960, seeks to ensure that the global oil trade serves the state.  The President and his sponsors seek an American OPEC, more accurately a Trump friends and family OPEC (TROPEC).

The inflation-adjusted price of a barrel of oil since 1960 has risen steadily, fluctuating with US wars in South East Asia, West Asia and Europe. It has grown roughly on par with global population density since 1960. What it has not done is kept pace with US federal debt, which went from $286 Billion in 1960 to over $40 Trillion today.  This points to a once great petrodollar falling on bad times, or more accurately, off a cliff.

Oil and gas have improved living conditions and enhanced productivity everywhere in the modern era, even as it has fueled and continues to fuel the US war machine, and that of her allies and opponents.  In a free and peaceful world, there would be more energy, and cheaper energy of every kind, for more people.  The empire opposes this future, in a variety of ways.   Saddled with unpayable debt and an increasingly worthless, unwanted and untrusted dollar, the USG seeks to capture and control the one thing that keeps her armies, and the world economy moving.

Donald Trump repeats his jingo, “[after the war] oil will drop like a rock.” The real story is better reported by Larry Johnson, Martin Armstrong, and Chris Martenson.   Donald Trump – doomed to failure – wants to make sure the whole world never forgets why they need us.  Controlling energy prices – and moving them upward to save the imperial currency, and position it well for a reset that is profitable for the ruling classes – is fundamental.

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