[agramante]

You touch on an important point, Rock--the inflation index is pretty low, and has been, for a long time now. Over the last fifteen years or so, inflation has hovered around 2.5%. So starting at 2000, 100 dollars then, across thirteen years at 2.5% inflation, is $137.50 now. (Even bumping that up to 3% inflation, since I was just reading quickly off a graph, results in $146,85, slightly less than 50% increase.) Contrast that with oil prices--take WTI and Brent, for example--




and from 2002 to the present day you'll see a roughly 500% increase in price. Plainly oil is outpacing inflation, at least in the USA. So I'd hesitate to use the term "inflation" in describing the price of oil, since "inflation" has a specific definition which doesn't seem to accurately describe what's going on with oil--and in fact, what I read about inflation discusses more the overall pricing of a wide variety of goods, not one specific product. But I'm not an economist so someone who is might want to disabuse me of this.

[C8]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'C')8 – “Yet these nations have not seen such a dramatic shift in wealth distribution as we have (USA)”. Really? Please show me the supporting stats.

And: “Oil exporting nations, such as SA, Canada, Russia have not shown a dramatic decrease in wealth inequality.” Russia doesn’t have a huge differential between wealthy and poor? You and I must read very different news reports. And you don’t believe the owners of private Canadian oil companies haven’t gotten sticking rich since oil jumped from $20/bbl? And Saudi Arabia? They probably have the highest income differential on the planet. Unless you count govt welfare as income…which I don’t. Just because they provide financial support to most of their population doesn’t change the fact that just several thousand Saudis control 90% of the wealth.

In the US there are 8 million small businesses each of which employs less than 100 employees. The produce a larger cash flow than all the larger corporations including those owned by the rich. They employ more folks than all the other bigger companies. They produce the majority of the products the US exports. They contribute more to the tax base than the other companies. They represent more than 90% of the companies in the US. Just out of curiosity please point the stats of other countries that have a wider distribution of their respective economies.

As always your opinions are welcomed. But let’s see some stats, please.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'S')ome 1.7 million people currently work in or around these new energy plays. By 2035, IHS expects the energy boom to directly or indirectly support 3.5 million American jobs. Around 700,000 of those jobs are expected to materialize within the next two years.

[C8]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('C8', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'C')8 – “Yet these nations have not seen such a dramatic shift in wealth distribution as we have (USA)”. Really? Please show me the supporting stats.

And: “Oil exporting nations, such as SA, Canada, Russia have not shown a dramatic decrease in wealth inequality.” Russia doesn’t have a huge differential between wealthy and poor? You and I must read very different news reports. And you don’t believe the owners of private Canadian oil companies haven’t gotten sticking rich since oil jumped from $20/bbl? And Saudi Arabia? They probably have the highest income differential on the planet. Unless you count govt welfare as income…which I don’t. Just because they provide financial support to most of their population doesn’t change the fact that just several thousand Saudis control 90% of the wealth.

In the US there are 8 million small businesses each of which employs less than 100 employees. The produce a larger cash flow than all the larger corporations including those owned by the rich. They employ more folks than all the other bigger companies. They produce the majority of the products the US exports. They contribute more to the tax base than the other companies. They represent more than 90% of the companies in the US. Just out of curiosity please point the stats of other countries that have a wider distribution of their respective economies.

As always your opinions are welcomed. But let’s see some stats, please.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('C8', 'P')O then becomes a relief valve for not confronting nasty politics or civic action, an intellectual diversion for not looking the real problem square in the eye.

[agramante]

C8 - I agree with nearly everything in your last post. Raw materials exports (including fossil fuels) don't translate into a middle class at all. Look at any of the major oil exporters these days: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mexico--or pretty much anyone in OPEC. It's such a capital-intensive, non-labor-intensive industry that major oil extraction operations don't need a large working force to be carried out. As to the forms that the class war has taken in the United States, they make me so upset that I don't want to go into them here, as they have little direct application to the topic of peak oil. Suffice to say, my mother was a history teacher, and I'm deeply ashamed to see what's being done to destroy public education. And that's just one part of the class war.

I would add that those conducting warfare on the former middle class and below, have strongly vested interests in continuing to conceal this war, and if peak oil is a convenient fig leaf, they will certainly use it. When "business as usual" becomes "ZOMG peakoil!" across the media spectrum, the reason will be obvious enough. (Not that I pay attention to most of that spectrum. I've purposefully avoided television/cable news for over twenty years.)