You are right on, Jim

There’s that guy from Trading Places again….”yeah”

here is a related story from guerrillanews.com

“Fidel Castro’s government has stepped up work on 36 new oil wells in partnership with Chinese and Canadian companies, officials said on Thursday.

The Cuban government is generally silent about oil matters, but this week Communist Party newspaper Granma also reported that Cuba had drilled its deepest oil well yet near Varadero, east of Havana.

Diplomatic sources said Indian, Norwegian and Spanish companies would begin searching for crude oil in the gulf.

The news has angered some US politicians, who say the US economic embargo of Cuba locks them out of the potentially lucrative operation at a time when oil prices are soaring.”

There were 305 refineries in the US in 1985. Then Reagan, with a Rep. majority, signed the Anti-Trust law and a few big oil companies grabbed up all of the smaller ones, thus closing down a couple hundred or so of these refineries you speak of. In Bush’s first 6 years in office, he had a Republican majority that closely mimicked a cult following, yet nothing was done. I think the republicans can also be blamed for this mess we are all in now. Placing all of the blame on dems and the press is far from the truth.

JDS, you need to go back to your history book. Reagan never had a Republican majority. If I am not mistaken, Reagan had a majority for 2 years in the Senate but never in the house. That’s not enough to do anything.

Let me ask you something. What is your problem with drilling for oil within S borders? I am beginning to think that you Democrats are the one’s with oil stocks. I really dont care about all the misdirection you guy’s come up with. I go back to basis and it’s called supply and demand. I learned a long time ago that you guys love to come up with all kinds of theories and you mean well but the bottom line is that you either have no clue how supply and demand works or you really dont care about paying high prices for fuel. High fuel prices makes everything more expensive. How hard is that to understand? Apparently it’s too hard for you lefties.

If you were A CEO of a oil company making record profits and your stockholders were laughing all the way to the bank, would you take on a costly project (exploring and drilling for new oil and building new refineries) or would you stay the course and keep profit high for the longest possible time? If the oil companies thought that even more profits could be had they would have started drilling a long time ago and congress never would have stopped them. So stop blaming the president or congress, and start blaming thoese in real control of gas prices: big oil.

It’s particularly “this way of life” that is the issue, Jim. We can’t keep living this way. That is why we are in the situation we are in. Drilling in Alaska is not going to save us, or bring down oil prices. It will just feed the addiction and prolong the inevitable. You have to think for the long haul, Jim, not just the moment. Alaska is not the answer. Conservation is. And that means… changing our way of life.

Stop blaming politicians for the consequences of our American society’s personal decisions. The economic mess we are in now didn’t start with Bush, even if he may have propelled it. Sometimes I think we revert to childlike, including denial. We all flap our lips about the high price of gasoline, trying to find the culprit, and we forget to look in the mirror. Who bought the gas hogs? Who let Madison Avenue Ad Execs convice us that we looked better, younger, more adventursome, established, successful or better than the other folks in town if we bought a gas guzzler. In fact not one guzzler, but as many as we could buy for our wives, kids, employees, or our favorite cowboy. And we drive everywhere we can, usually alone, because we can’t stand to be dependent on someone. We showed Detroit and OPEC for decades that we really only give lip service to conserving energy, both personal and corporate, and now we’re shocked that they have still squeeze us for every dime they can? Regarding just this one crisis we ourselves created, “energy disaster #101″, it would take a benevolent dictator as a President to force policies that would develop alternative energy products, establish an effective energy conservation plan, or eliminate corporate excess profit taking on energy products. We were warned, we laughed it off, and now we walk more.

Yes, both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of destroying our lives becuase they will not grant permission to drill in the US. So what’s the alternative?