What's Good for Shell...

Ducky left a quote by Timothy Parsons in the last thread. It's as good a place as any to start.
"The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty." He backs this up with some good examples.

What needs to be added, I believe, is that this is not as straightforward a paradox as it may seem. Because at the same time "empire" is stripping it is also bestowing. I know ten small contractors locally who depend on Defence Dept. contracts and these are spread out in each region of each state. So just as capitalism keeps the worker alive just long enough to extract her labor power before impoverishing her, so empire works the same magic. We run furiously in circles, holding a gun to our own head, threatening to shoot ourselves if we don't successfully compete. Only to die of exhaustion and sorrow.

My email account was hacked yesterday so that somebody could try to sell junk to all my "contacts".
This is a pretty bizarre sales strategy IMHO. Rather than advertise a product and hope for customers they attack me and my acquaintances with deceptive bullshit (nobody bought anything). Who does this? The same people who want you to send them your bank account number? What a pathetic existence!

I spent the morning trying to parse out the weird lexicon of modern energy development, stuff like oil shale vs shale oil, coal to liquids and gasification and "cracking" and fracking. As I am peripherally involved with "peak oil" folks, it seemed necessary to know a little more about Hubbards curve and all that but in the end, it's just another rabbit hole of capitalist calculations. Reserves, resources, recoverable, economically viable discoveries, inputs, outputs.
I think the bottom line is, the easy sweet stuff is about sucked dry and they are scrambling to squeeze oil out of rocks, or bitumen out of sand or kerogen out of sandstone. Same pathetic existence.