Following a 1998 discussion of petroleum industry power politics, this program analyzes the phony “oil shortage” of the late 1970s against the background of the allegedly real “oil shortage” of the year 2000. Beginning with the soaring price of gasoline in the late winter and early spring of 2000, the program focuses on excerpts from the book The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus and Mark Aarons (St. Martin’s Press, copyright 1994).
The authors draw on an exhaustive bibliography, as well as veteran American and British intelligence officers, to document collusion among George Bush’s CIA, the petroleum industry and Saudi Arabia. Together, these elements fabricated an alleged Soviet petroleum shortfall, as well as a phony “decline” in Saudi oil production. Career oil industry professional George Bush gave Jimmy Carter a CIA report that falsely maintained that the world would experience an oil shortage and that the Soviets might invade the Middle East in order to secure petroleum.
The goal of the report was to influence Jimmy Carter to increase oil production and to mandate weapons sales to Saudi Arabia in order to “defend against the Soviet menace”. Carter and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger instead responded with a program of conservation. This enraged the petroleum interests, which then responded with the phony “gas shortage” of 1979. This gas shortage helped to propel Jimmy Carter from office. (Schlesinger had resigned his post earlier in Carter’s administration.)
Former CIA director Bush became Vice-President under Reagan and (according to Loftus and Aarons) was the actual “power behind the throne.” Eventually, it became evident that the CIA report was false and that the Middle East was swimming in oil. Nonetheless, the CIA/Saudi/petroleum industry fraud was successful in conning consumers into accepting dramatically higher gasoline prices, destabilizing the Carter administration and persuading Congress and the President to authorize a Saudi military buildup.
That Saudi build-up tipped the military balance of power in favor of the Arabs. Most importantly, the phony oil shortage set the stage for an unprecedented military build-up during the Reagan administrations. That military build-up tripled the U.S. national debt in eight years.
The program concludes with a look at the Republican attempt to blame Al Gore for the increase in the price of gasoline. George Bush’s son, George W. Bush is running for President on the Republican ticket. Like his father, he is a career petroleum-industry professional.
Program Highlights Include: discussion of George W’s connections to Saudi business interests; media criticism of the phony CIA oil report; analysis of the drop in refinery production in 1979 and its influence on the “gas shortage;” a veteran intelligence officer’s blunt statement that the “gas shortage” of 1979 was as phony as the George Bush-led CIA’s fabrications about Soviet petroleum shortfall; speculation that the oil shortage of 2000 is being deliberately arranged in order to put George W. Bush in the White House. (Recorded on 3/19/2000.)
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=85296&pageid=37&pagename=Page+One
PUMP: The Movie that Can Kick the Oil Addiction
Edwin Black September 15th 2014
ISIS has trebled its forces within recent months and in large measure finances its expansion with $10 million to $20 million per week in illicit oil sales from as many as 70 captured oil wells.
Iran now has multiplied its centrifuges to almost 20,000, enabling it to convert its 5 percent and 20 percent enriched uranium to 90 percent weapons grade HEU within a 7‑week breakout period. With sanctions lifted, Tehran’s monthly oil revenues have soared to almost 3 million barrels per day, generating billions of dollars per month.
Tiny Qatar, with only about 280,000 citizens, provides Hamas with some $400 million annually. Qatar exports more than 600,000 barrels of oil per day helping to establish an estimated $200 billion petrodollar reserve.
Oil is driving it all —and more.
American petroleum use accounts for about one-quarter of global consumption, depending upon whose numbers you’re refining. Kicking our oil addiction is an old mantra that is preached daily from the sidelines by an army of expert energy analysts and security insiders.
A slick, kinetic new Hollywood movie, PUMP, is breaking out of the wooden oil documentary mold to help power a concerted national effort to get off of oil.
PUMP’s point is easily distilled: if simple fuel choice were implemented, it would quickly dilute the power of petroleum and those who sell it. PUMP combines flashy cinematography and rock music with irrefutable testimony by the likes of former Shell president John Hofmeister, Tesla founder Elon Musk, analyst Annie Korin, and Auto Channel editor Marc Rauch. I also appear in the film with the inside historical story of corporate crimes committed by General Motors and Standard Oil to cripple the electric mass transit system which proliferated in the first years of the twentieth century, and replace it with oil consuming buses — in other words, how we got here.
As I wrote in my book Internal Combustion and subsequent works, we never needed to be addicted to oil. Never. The electric car was invented in about 1835. Until the run-up to WW I, most of the motor vehicles in America were electric-powered, until Edison’s plans were subverted by the car industry and the manufacturers switched to gas-burning internal combustion vehicles.
The much-vaunted hydrogen fuel cell that uses water as a feedstock is based on technology developed back in 1838. Some years ago, I drove an ordinary showroom Hydrogen-powered Chevrolet Equinox all over Southern California on a single tank of hydrogen. That hydrogen fuel was zapped from simple water, filled at a public Shell station on Santa Monica Boulevard that maintained a hydrogen pump on the side. Hydrogen supplies are abundant in the US — it’s the ingredient needed for unleaded gas.
More than 17 million compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles operate worldwide. A petroleum car can be converted to natural gas in a day. But in America, less than 120,000 operate —in large measure because Honda, America’s major NGV car manufacturer, stubbornly refuses to mass market its own vehicle beyond a few thousand per year.
Methanol, ethanol, a basket of other alcohol and alternative fuels — all can power an automobile with virtually equal ability. This is the so-called “Open Fuel Standard” that goes hand-in-hand with the flex-fuel designed vehicles that more than 17 million Americans drive – yet many don’t know it. A minor adjustment in the software and the fuel system would allow fuel democracy — any alt fuel from anyone willing to provide it.
That is the message in PUMP: Fuel democracy to protect American democracy. Unlock the car engines the way we want to unlock our cell phones.
Until we have a moment of truth with ourselves, America is destined to not only be addicted to oil, but addicted to all the terrible trappings that come with oil.
PUMP opens September 19 at many theater screens across America, including the AMC 25 in Times Square. You can locate a PUMP screening anywhere in America. Prepare to get angry. Getting off of oil is easier than we think — if we mobilize national will. There has never been a better or more critical time to energize this than now.
Edwin Black is the award-winning author of the international bestseller IBM and the Holocaust and the award-winning Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives.
See trailer to film here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTytxMdlazM