On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:42:22 -0400, "Eisboch" wrote:




Fair enough, but still, it's speculative and subjective. I am looking for
specific reasons why and how the *POTUS* controls the price of oil on the
world market and the value of the dollar.

Ask yourself why the Captain is responsible when a ship runs aground.
Same difference.
Don't get me wrong. It's not just Bush. The Wall Street Greed gang
is running this ship, and the crew has lost all discipline, drunk as
they are on cheap Chinese grog. Bush is just their figurehead,
nothing more. It started with Reagan's hare-brained Voodoo economics,
and his successors have carried on.
But each Captain is still responsible.
The cheap dollar - Polish people tell American dollar jokes - can be
directly tied to U.S. deficit spending and debt, and lack of goods
production in the U.S. due to offshoring jobs to keep the grog cheap.
The price of oil is a storm the ship was willingly steered into, when
all the radar showed it was there. Good Captains would have treated
oil with at least as much respect as made water, and confined the crew
to Navy showers while he had the engineers work on alternatives.
But the Captains were weak, and the crew were whiners.
Long luxurious baths in oil were the norm.
The law of supply and demand was ignored.
We're on the rocks now. There's only one Captain.
I don't see the upcoming replacements as being much better.
It will take Pat Buchanan, Dick Nixon, maybe Lou Dobbs
types to get us off the rocks permanently.
A hardass, not the gutless internationalists in the hopper.
Might be facile analogies, but that's one way to look at it.
From my perspective, our biggest weakness is consumer deadbeatism.
As a country, you can't consume more than you produce.
Not for long, anyway.
Anyway, that's how I see it. Of course, I might be all wrong.

--Vic