Americans need to buy smaller and lighter cars. It’s the reality. Only a reduction in consumption will reduce demand to the point that it’ll dent the price.

We also need to DRILL everywhere that we can.

You have to understand the bigger picture to realize why this is all happening … no joke, check out the links I provided above … THAT is reality with respect to the oil nightmare. The economic situation, predominantly in the U.S., is ABYSMAL. Nobody really knows how bad it is because they don’t really understand economics. You can’t have a government solve all problems by lying to its people with phony inflation numbers. You can’t have a government solve all problems with artificially low interest rates to stave off a recession, which is sometimes necessary. You can’t have public, taxpayer dollars paying for horrendous mistakes by bankers who use derivatives to make profits illegally.

Like I’ve stated to ‘NoNameDufus’ recently, BearStearns is GONE … one of the biggest investment banks in the WORLD is GONE!!!! If that isn’t a sign of what’s to come, you all need to give up now and kill yourselves. There will be more failures coming, ignoring the rise of small bank failures that nobody cares to talk about, that will/should shock you all.

The “maintain social order at all cost” plan can only run so long, so far … and when REAL inflation comes and smacks everyone with something you haven’t seen in your lifetime, please remember it was me, Impulsive, who warned you all. I’ve mentioned buying gold several times here and I’ll mention it again, buy gold now … you will thank me this year and again within three years.

The strike in Spain is not about cost of fuel, no government can fix that: Spanish or US alike. The strike is by smaller operators for who diesel cost more then then for large companies. Like everywhere there are cost saving measures large companies enjoy in Spain and small operators feel squeezed. Large tracking companies purchase diesel in bulk for their facility and since Spain is not all that big (compare to US) trucks can fuel up at the depot and make round trip all around country. Small operators have to go to gas station for fuel and pay $7.60/gallon. The prices for deliveries are dictated by large companies, based on their reduced cost of fuel. Before the price increase, smallish operators could compete, becuase cost of fuel was less percentage wise then cost of corporate bureaucracy.

Unfortunately as much as I would love to see it, to me I predict gas continuing to rise and eventually hitting $5 and 6$ a barrel by the next two years.

Bolex: “Spain has cars?” Yes, they do, they’re like FIAT but Spanish; SEAT. Their style is cool and they’re non-luxury hatch’s, most of them.

Obviusly looking at the big picture we need to eventually become independent of fossil fuels, but something has to be done.

WWIII is not fiction, we’re already in it. You can think of our current period as being equivalent to 1937 Europe with Iran playing the role of Germany and North Korea playing the role of Japan and the USA playing the role of Britain. The sooner the world realizes the mess we’re in politically (instead of denying it and even trying to say that 9/11 was a conspiracy of the right-wing in the US government), the sooner we meet these problems head-on.

Don’t forget, OPEC hasn’t increased production in three years while the world’s economy (and thus need for petroleum) has grown at about 5% per anum over that time. That’s a total of nearly 20% more demand for fuel with the same supply. (If you think 5% per anum means 15% then you need to learn about compounding sums).

It’ll be interesting to see how this carries out. I commend the working men and women of Spain for doing this but will it turn out to be more harm than good? We need to moniter this very closely and see how it pans out and maybe the people in the U.S. and other countries will follow suit…