Yesterday, oil roared out of the box, blasting past $ 142 a barrel. Our wasteful energy intensive society is simply being brought to it's knees by high energy prices. Energy market analysts say that high prices are here to stay, so you all can forget about returning to that Norman Rockwell, picture perfect America when fuel was cheap and living was easy. Things are hard, and they are going to get harder, with $ 200 a barrel being predicted perhaps by the end of the summer. That translates into $ 7.00 a gallon to run the family car !!! For every dollar increase in the price of a barrel, you can add 2.5 cents to the " pain at the pump ". Though it is the beginning of summer, winter in the Northeast is feeling more and more ominous, dark and cold. This is what happens when you let two oil men run the government for 7 years : higher and higher prices. An analyst on NPR last night described this June as the WORST since 1930 for Wall Street, as day after day of triple digit drops in the market value mount up and the US dollar continues its free fall descent.

Unprecedented change is here. It can not be stopped. Airlines are folding up, shutting down service to airports. Albany just lost one major carrier at its airport, and Bradley outside of Hartford Ct. has now canceled direct service to the West Coast. Truckers are complaining that they will have to shut down their rigs permanently. Since most everything is trucked these days in 18 wheelers, moving goods around the country is getting more pricey by the day. Even mighty Foxwoods Casino is feeling the pinch, slashing away at its employees due to a decline in people traveling to gamble. From top to bottom, the country, the very life we have known is changing, morphing under the weight of rising energy prices, transforming into a brutal economically violent place that looks similar, but is distinctly different than any America we have known, short of the Great Depression.

It is the confluence of factors that is doing us in. All we can do is adapt as best we can on a personal basis. Washington is entirely flatfooted on all this, useless and incompetent. The country is adrift, as bad as this writer has ever seen it, and there is worse to come, as the total failure of our political leadership to produce a coherent energy policy over the last thirty years becomes glaringly clear.


... " The BBC's North America Editor, Justin Webb, says the gloomy fiqures are a reminder to all Americans that the nation faces serious economic problems and perhaps even a recession.
Oil prices were given a boost on a report from Morgan Stanley analyst Ole Slorer, who suggested that the price of oil would reach as high as $150 as early as July.

Some analysts have suggested that prices would reach as high as $200 a barrel during the next 18 months.

... The market was also responding to a statement by Israel's transport minister that an attack on Iran was ' unavoidable ' after sanctions to prevent Tehran from developing its nuclear capability had failed.

... Investors hedging against the weak dollar has also pushed up the price of oil . "



The wolf at the door is not going away. If Israel bombs Iran, real Hell will break loose, and oil prices will go totally ballistic, affecting everyone, save the very rich, who could give a rats ass if we can afford heating oil next winter. For all they care, we can all freeze to death in the dark next winter. Things are already bad enough, with two wars raging endlessly, effectively bankrupting the country, leaving us with no capacity to do what needs to be done to transform the nations energy profile. Solar, wind, and biomass need government subsidies and tax credits to scale up, yet Bush and Co. seem determined to keep these options off the table as long as possible, to help the corpo- bastards maximize profits, while we all suffer.