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Thursday, May 29, 2008

Depending on the aim, perhaps it was accomplished.



Wikipedia, source of the above photo, says:

"Mission Accomplished", a military phrase associated with completing a mission, is in recent years particularly associated with a sign displayed on the USS Abraham Lincoln during a televised address by United States President George W. Bush on May 1, 2003.




While sometimes seeming to fit the phrase "Every village has one," the man certainly got the profit direction right, from mid-2003 onward, as the chart shows. And mid-2003 is when he went to a navy carrier to show the direction Big Oil profits were headed since initiating a few months earlier the still-ongoing ill-fated occupation of Iraq. Some of his standing-in-rank-and-file-and-listening-as-ordered spectators on the carrier probably had friends at risk of dying in the ground war.

Bless his family sense, for profit. Bless the Carlyle Group. Bless Halliburton. Bless Prescott and the Thyssen family. Not that following generations are to be held responsible for predecessor acts. Under the closing sentence of Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution that would be improper.

But on his own score, the rumors about the AWOL from Guard duty circumstances never have been put to rest, see here, and here.

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Chart is among other interesting information, here.

That reporting lays to rest the pernicious shiboleth that Newt Gingrich now appears intent to promote via slick falsehoods reminiscent of "Contract With America" rhetoric and paraphernalia, that denial to Big Oil of its will to drilling profligately is why prices are up.

There is supply. There is demand. Demand is harder to jigger than supply, especially in a concentrated seller-controlled vertically integrated situation.

And when the Saudis are given heat over supply at the ground spigot, they indicate a willingness to build more US refinery capacity anytime the authorities will permit it. Bandar, while ambassador, enjoyed pointing out that domestic refinery capacity, and its management, was the bottleneck, the choke point, for availability and pricing at the US-of-A neighborhood gas pump - doing this indirectly and discretely, of course, simply by indicating of record (more than once) on CNN the Saudi willingness to fund building additional refinery capacity right here, in the US-of-A.

And they're experienced, see here, (with a little help from their friends), and here.

The got-you-by-the---uh-throat aspect of refined product supply is NOT the ground in the mid-east, even with Iraq off the market while occupied, but at the Koch Twin Cities facility, and comparable facilities nationwide.

Same with petrochem products, be it plastics or agrichemicals. Food costs more to consume if it costs more to produce, never mind corn diversion into Cargill ethanol plants, off the human feedstock market, to use as an industrial feedstock and then onward, as feedlot feedstock, in Lubbock.




Back to Bush and oil; see also, here.

Think about the man's proper retirement, in Crawford, Texas, next trip to the pump. Think whether ethanol from corn, taking food off the market while food prices soar as the dollar plunges, think, is that a good idea.

All those ethanol plants probably ultimately will be converted, if feasible to cellulosic biomass processing, vs food out of the mouths of the hungry. Still, the carbon cost of producing ethanol, the water needed, many factors suggest that boosting the price of corn for farmers and intermediaries might not be the wisest thing we could do, and even aside from diversion of foodstuffs, biodiesel and cellulosic conversion may be negative on an energy consumption-yield basis, never mind on a full environmental balance sheet consideration. But retire Bush first. Then worry about ethanol dynamics.