#1
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#2
what
#3
David Harvey presents a meaningful, systematic analysis of capitalism and imperialism as it relates to control over diminishing resources. Here, instead have this shallow populist explanation which blames the jewish menace.
#4
matt taibbi's griftopia, which i read, actually has a good chapter about this called "blowout"

you can read most of it here, google only hides a couple pages
#5
It's obvious that speculation on oil is what causes oil prices to fluctuate randomly. But this doesn't really explain anything, like blaming lack of regulation on property speculation. What about oil makes it so vulnerable to speculation? Why were regulations relaxed in the first place? How does the fixed nature of oil geographically relate to the global flows of capital? How do oil speculators as a faction of capital relate to other factions and what kind of contradictions emerge? What happens when oil does become scarce or at least more expensive to extract, is this kind of speculation inherent to the capitalist relation to nature or a temporary phenomenon? How does the parasitic nature of imperialism relate to oil suppliers; what kind of revolutionary spaces does this open up (Venezuela)?

Matt Taibi is good for waking weak liberals up I guess, but I find that kind of analysis boring and often dangerous when it blames Goldman Sachs rather than the system (isn't Lloyd Blankenfein basically the Rothschild of today?).
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#8
Hmn. Actually I think you'll find that the price of gas is going to drop drastically when Mitt Romney is elected president.
#9

discipline posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

How does the fixed nature of oil geographically relate to the global flows of capital?

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5296/capitalism-and-class-in-the-gulf-arab-states



I've heard you mention a few times how Zionist techniques of population control are the model for future systems of discipline. I think I can see the wheels turning in your brain, since the disposable, vulnerable slave labor in the gulf states is a very extreme form of the western "precariat" (a shitty word but it does approach some truth no one has really hit yet) that you've been talking about for a while. I'm assuming you see this as the model for all future labor in a technological system in which capital is highly mobile and labor remains fixed and are thinking of the strategies socialism can take in this situation. I would be interested if I'm on the right track. Cool book too, I'll probably read it when I quit my job in a blaze of glory.

#10
In David Harvey's last-last lecture he talks about Merchant Capital vs. Industrial Capital in Vol. 3, and talks about our current epoch as characterized by the supremacy of merchant capital over industrial capital (Wal-Mart vs. Sweatshops, Apple vs. Foxcom, etc) and if/how this contradicts Marx's ideal on the supremacy of industrial capital. In classic Harvey fashion he gives no answers or ideas for solving the problem, not his forte clearly. To use Harvey again, capital's mobility is a result of "socially necessary turnover time" approaching zero thanks to technology, can labor match this by making "socially necessary labor time" approach zero (sounds like the Venus project >.>)? Or is the answer to root capital back in nationalist borders (this is the fascist answer that's popular here)? Obviously the trivial utopian marxist answer is a spontaneous global revolution but let's be reasonable men. All of these things are connected in my head, I just can't articulate them yet.
#11

babyhueypnewton posted:

Obviously the trivial utopian marxist answer is a spontaneous global revolution but let's be reasonable men.


babyhueypnewton posted:

men.







babyhueypnewton posted:

I just can't articulate






Edited by eccentricdeathmongrel ()

#12

eccentricdeathmongrel posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Obviously the trivial utopian marxist answer is a spontaneous global revolution but let's be reasonable men.

babyhueypnewton posted:

men.




babyhueypnewton posted:

I just can't articulate








Don't you read books? It's a specific philosophy diction, retard.

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#15
huey you and me'll talk more about labor mobility on eleciton day
#16

discipline posted:

And best part is, they trade this oil at record high prices (going long, betting that the price will never go down) on the assumption that the world isn’t going to stop using oil anytime soon. So, if you want a good reason to kill an electric car and hippy-green policies such as lowering our consumption on oil… well, there’s another market that’s gonna collapse!

why would very high oil prices discourage research into alternative energies.

#17

discipline posted:

we can make another thread about labor mobility if you want babyhuey. this is about commodities trading



nah I mostly post to get stuff out of my head. I can't see much in the OP to talk about though, but i hate Matt Taibi and I don't really care for the Exiled (sorry Impper)

#18
interesting. but how come speculators didn't do the same thing for natural gas prices in north america? And how come natural gas prices are more on par with oil prices in Europe/Asia? Does that mean speculators in Europe have more freedom to fuck with commodities than NA?
#19
Is this stuff TRUE or is this stuff NOT TRUE, KHAMSEK?
#20
I would have thought that the tens of thousands of cars hitting China’s streets each and every day might have something to do with it as well
#21
Besides, suck it up yanqui. Gas in your country is half what it is here and a quarter what it is in the UK and much of Europe, boo hoo.
#22

1. Americans do not use their own oil. Oil drilled domestically is shipped abroad.
2. Americans mainly use imported oil from South America, not the Middle East.
3. There is no shortage of oil on the market.



ummmm maybe you shouldn't conflate crude oil and refined oil. the USA only exports like 17 million barrels of crude a year. not that much i must say.
The US imports and exports a shit ton of oil because refining is a really tough task, and only the proud strong American is up to such a task. refineries cost billions of dollars. building the infrastructure to refine would require lots of work and i think most countries appreciate all the work america is doing for refining the crude for them.

yeah there is no shortage of oil, if there was we wouldn't be able to drive cars! but there is a shortage of future supplies. Reserves in NA are dwindling, pretty much all conventional oil deposits in US/Canada have been exploited heavily. This is reality and not some wizandry made up by goldman sachs. i'm sure they have influence in the price but probably not nearly as much as you'd like to believe.

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#25
con judios, se pierde
#26

discipline posted:

hey posted:
yeah there is no shortage of oil, if there was we wouldn't be able to drive cars! but there is a shortage of future supplies. Reserves in NA are dwindling, pretty much all conventional oil deposits in US/Canada have been exploited heavily. This is reality and not some wizandry made up by goldman sachs. i'm sure they have influence in the price but probably not nearly as much as you'd like to believe.


how does a future shortage justify a 470% increase and somehow have nothing to do with the index market being deregulated at the same time prices started to rise



But surely it wasn’t just a future shortage that prompted that price……demand would have skyrocketed across Asia in that decade and you’ve got distribution bottlenecks and ports, refineries, pipelines, all of those are going to add to the price.

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#28

babyhueypnewton posted:

discipline posted:

we can make another thread about labor mobility if you want babyhuey. this is about commodities trading

nah I mostly post to get stuff out of my head. I can't see much in the OP to talk about though, but i hate Matt Taibi and I don't really care for the Exiled (sorry Impper)



same, epic same

#29
iwc has a point though, non-OECD oil demand growth has gone from being about the same ten years ago to being about three times more today
#30

discipline posted:

hey posted:

yeah there is no shortage of oil, if there was we wouldn't be able to drive cars! but there is a shortage of future supplies. Reserves in NA are dwindling, pretty much all conventional oil deposits in US/Canada have been exploited heavily. This is reality and not some wizandry made up by goldman sachs. i'm sure they have influence in the price but probably not nearly as much as you'd like to believe.

how does a future shortage justify a 470% increase and somehow have nothing to do with the index market being deregulated at the same time prices started to rise


War on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, Chavez being elected, discussions of C02 taxes all had some pretty major impact on prices. But maybe these events don't have nearly as much as an impact as I think they do. And that the speculators used things like katrina and war on Iraq to adjust the prices, that way no one would think twice about the price of oil because now they have the perfect excuses.

What makes this all hard to believe though, is that all the unconventional oil extraction methods like the oil sands and tight oil plays require huge amounts of capital and are barely economic. they are highly dependent on the high oil prices of today. And I would imagine that prices that have been artificially inflated by speculators like you say they are, would also make the prices very vulnerable, because instead of being driven by the Real Markets of supply/demand, they are driven by a group of analysts at goldman. As a result, I don't think these huge multi-nationals would put so much money into things like oil sands and risk losing billions of dollars because of an accounting mistake or if we go back to historical regulations.

#31

discipline posted:

hey posted:

yeah there is no shortage of oil, if there was we wouldn't be able to drive cars! but there is a shortage of future supplies. Reserves in NA are dwindling, pretty much all conventional oil deposits in US/Canada have been exploited heavily. This is reality and not some wizandry made up by goldman sachs. i'm sure they have influence in the price but probably not nearly as much as you'd like to believe.

how does a future shortage justify a 470% increase and somehow have nothing to do with the index market being deregulated at the same time prices started to rise



I'm inherently suspicious of any theory that blames conscious collusion amongst a hundred different actors or that one actor e.g. goldman is somehow pulling the entire market. Goldman is certainly influential and has a lot of weight to throw around, but there are thousands of firms out there that are all trying to get rich.

I mean, certainly speculation cycles are certainly an inherent part of capitalism, but I don't think that's the only thing at play. If we look at price of crude oil, at least by my inspection, we can fit an exponential curve to it with decent accuracy. That makes sense, as oil extraction is linearly expanding (f'(x) = kx) as we add more extraction points, our oil reserves are exponentially decreasing (at least until we reach some peak extraction). But either way, if there is an expanding demand, the relation will still be exponential.

Also, you need to remember that a decade ago industry and finance seriously believed that oil could be extracted at increasing rates forever and that they were buying the overblown estimates of oil reserves given out by countries.

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you mean very high prices reduces demand while encouraging new supply? wow. someone tell the resource economists.
#35

getfiscal posted:

you mean very high prices reduces demand while encouraging new supply? wow. someone tell the resource economists.



Is your trolling about how you don't understand price inelasticity of oil

#36
“a 10 percent permanent increase in oil prices reduces oil demand by about 0.7 percent after 20 years.”

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/01/pdf/text.pdf
#37
oil is giffen. believe it. giffen is fucking real, finally
#38
speculators don't actually affect the market. i know because i read d7d
#39
where is all the hoarded oil that's allegedly being bought by the speculationers. where are they keeping it. are there a dozen oil tankers parked in Morgan Stanley's basement. F- try harder
#40
actually there was an episode where a commodity trader got a phone call saying "captain something here, where do you want these several thousand tons of coal then" and he looked out his window and due to a dreadful misunderstanding a gigantic container ship had sailed up to his harbourfront office building