Dependencies…

The health of the world economy has a few dependencies. Oil happens to be one of them. What nation doesn’t depend on oil, doesn’t need oil? How high can oil prices go before it has a detrimental effect on a society, where it upsets the economical balance enough to cause cataclysm? We found that out at the end of George Bush’s last term in office, toward the end of 2008. Gas prices kept going up until the housing market collapsed. People could no longer meet their financial obligations. The whole world’s economy appeared to hang in the balance. If America, the Wal-Mart of the world goes down, enters a full blown depression, it will snowball…and all those other countries that have built up entire industries that are dependent, at least partially, on being able to sell volumes in America will also suffer loss, and or fail. More and more people will become unemployed all over the world, and therefore, more and more people will no longer be able to be ‘consumers’. Other industries will fail….etc. You get the picture? It would snowball! That makes oil and its cost pretty dang important. When it comes to the sovereignty of other nations, what do you think the industrialized nations of the world would be willing to do to insure continued reasonable costs on oil? How about just about anything?

The other thing that is interesting regarding these oil rich countries in the Middle East is that we, the USA, have dictated that they shall NOT have nuclear weapons. This seems rather hypocritical considering that we have more nuclear weapons than any other country on the surface of the planet. I guess we’ve made ourselves the self appointed policemen of the world? The question is, of course, by our merits, do we deserve to be in that place? Apparently, the answer to that question depends a lot on where you were born and how much you need our military might to insure your continued economic welfare. As that self-appointed policeman, though, we threaten war and invasion if those countries that we depend on to provide oil to the markets at a reasonable cost even think about developing nuclear weapons. Regarding those nations in the Middle East, we used to claim that we couldn’t allow them to have nuclear weapons because of Israel. Though I’ll admit that that’s a tough one to argue with, especially when numbskulls like Ahmadinejad are around, it appears that nowadays the line is a bit blurred due to our actions in Iraq and the subsequent lack of WMDs? Our true motives for invading Iraq, therefore, come into question. One thing that is undeniable, is that America makes no bones about the fact that we will get involved militarily if our ‘interests’ require it. Well, we know that reasonable prices (by our definition at least) on oil/energy is definitely in our ‘interest’. Our energy dependencies will definitely get us up in arms. Of course, nuclear weapons are the only thing that can, at least potentially, guarantee those same oil rich nations any sort of sovereignty in the long run. If you were Iran, would you be building a nuclear weapon?