Why Are Leftists And Elitists So Happy About Skyrocketing Gas Prices?
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
There is a narrative being spread within leftist/socialist circles by media celebrities and White House cronies, and it is this: Paying high prices for oil and gas is actually a GOOD thing.
But why is it a good thing to these people? How do they benefit?
Spoiler Alert: It has nothing to do with punishing Russia economically.
As I write this article crude prices have somewhat stabilized around $110-$115 a barrel, which translates to a little over $4 a gallon for gas across most of the country. I don’t expect this to last very long. My guess is that regular gasoline will end up in the $7 to $8 per gallon range before US shale oil roars back and balances out the market. I realize that this is a conservative estimate and perhaps a best case scenario. Gas could go much higher depending on speculation in oil markets as well as continued government interference from the Biden Administration.
The big secret is that gas prices were already going to inflate to epic highs, the Ukraine event is not a catalyst, it’s just adding a little petro to the house fire. The fact is, there are some people out there that are desperate for prices to go much higher regardless of what happens in Ukraine.
This past week, late night “comedian” and establishment shill Stephen Colbert declared that he was willing to pay as much as $15 a gallon for gas, because he owns a Tesla (this is the same guy that danced around with walking/talking syringes to promote experimental covid vaccines for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer). To understand elitist clowns like Colbert you have to realize that he is a rather new iteration of the old Operation Mockingbird propaganda model.
Let’s set aside the prospect that Colbert is a complete idiot who doesn’t seem to grasp that the electricity that charges his Tesla is most likely generated in part or in full by natural gas, oil or coal. The cost of charging up his car is going to inflate right along with normal energy prices. Instead, let’s consider the possibility that Colbert is simply regurgitating a narrative that was assigned to him, just as he has done in the past.
Decades ago, Americans were fed lies and misinformation primarily by the corporately controlled mainstream media because we used to care about what the MSM had to say. Today, almost no one cares about the MSM and their dismal audience numbers prove that. There are alternative media channels on YouTube and alt-news websites that crush CNN and MSNBC numbers. We dominate them. That said, there are still leftist outlets that get high traffic, and they are primarily comedy shows.
Colbert still enjoys hefty audience numbers of around 1 million of more viewers per video because this is how younger people have learned to digest their news content – through mediocre comedy. This model was rather successful in the old days of Comedy Central and the Daily Show with John Stewart. I will say that Stewart was at least fair in that he criticized his own side almost as often as he criticized the political right. But, that kind of self examination no longer exists on the left.
Colbert in particular must have been invited to a gay old time at Bohemian Grove or some other elitist getaway camp because he now acts as if Biden’s arm is halfway up his posterior, controlling him like a sock puppet. His show certainly receives ad revenues from Pfizer considering his parent company CBS has extensive marketing deals with them, but his relationship with the White House is a little less clear. What we do know is that Biden has been very active in attempting to reinforce his already comfortable relationship with social media companies and mainstream journalists; so why not late night talk show hosts also?
There’s more than a few talking heads out there promoting the “expensive gas is good” idea. There’s a host of politicians and celebrities including the ever obnoxious George Takei of Star Trek fame who claims that paying higher gas prices is worth it if it means doing damage to Putin. Then there’s White House Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who argues that the solution to high gas prices is, once again, for Americans to start buying electric cars and for the government to spend billions in taxpayer dollars to develop fleets of electric buses.
“Today is about how we can deliver cleaner air, a better climate, affordable transportation, and good jobs all at once…” Buttigieg said. Obviously, none of this is true.
Biden and many other Democrats have been enthusiastic about high gas prices as if the American people are confusing a win for a loss. Interestingly, only a few years ago in 2019 Democratic governors demanded an end to federal gas taxes to alleviate consumer prices. This was back when gas was only around $3 a gallon nationally. So what changed?
It should be noted that many of the policies being presented to the American public as solutions to Russian oil sanctions and energy inflation are identical to policies that were part of the Green New Deal, a program designed to completely cut off the US from oil using carbon controls and carbon taxation. Isn’t it convenient that the Russian/Ukraine crisis has facilitated a vehicle for such policies to be implemented?
There’s a few problems, though.
For one, Russian oil only makes up around 3% to 4% of US crude imports. The media and the White House have attempted to misrepresent the percentage by adding in “refined products” from Russia to boost the numbers as high as 8%. This is false. In fact, Russian crude is a tiny portion of foreign oil imports to the US.
This means that cutting Russian oil exports to the US has NOTHING to do with rising prices. The two things are unrelated in terms of supply and demand. Celebrities like Stephen Colbert and George Takei look doubly stupid because sanctions not only don’t hurt the Russians, they also don’t explain why prices are so high in America.
Biden’s electric car initiatives are strange in light of the fact that inflation is already straining people’s pocketbooks yet the government is suggesting those same struggling Americans buy $50,000 to $100,000 vehicles. None of this actually addresses the root causes of the inflation we face. Rather, Biden and leftists seem to be saying “We aren’t interested in fixing the problem, you are just going to have to adapt in the ways we want you to adapt…”
Clearly, the establishment does not want the public to question the real triggers for the inflationary disaster we are witnessing. This is illustrated very well in an article I found by CBS declaring that any suggestions that high oil prices are somehow tied to Biden’s electric car program is “conspiracy theory” related to QAnon.
This is bizarre. For one, there really aren’t many people out there suggesting that high oil prices are only about forcing people to buy electric cars (and CBS gives no proof of this narrative). That said, I live in the world of conspiracy reality, not conspiracy “theory.” What I do see on a regular basis are people pointing out that gas inflation and overall inflation started LONG before Russia invaded Ukraine; it’s just that now Biden has a scapegoat to blame high prices on while also instituting Green New Deal actions.
Joe Biden and his shameless press secretary Jen Psaki have consistently argued that Putin is the primary cause of inflationary pressures, but inflation in the US hit a 40 year high as early as December of last year; even the World Economic Forum admits this.
CBS and other corporate media outlets seem to be aware of the truth and the complaints that are about to spread across the country and they are attempting to preempt the unrest by calling anyone that questions the narrative a “crazy tinfoil hatter.”
Here are the facts:
The US Dollar is not only the world reserve currency, it is also the global petro-currency. Meaning, almost all oil to this point has been bought and sold using dollars.
When the dollar faces aggressive inflation and devaluation, one of the very first signals or warning signs is higher oil prices. As the dollar fails, oil prices will spike. This can sometimes be mitigated by a flood of supply on the market as we saw under Trump (the US was a net exporter of oil only a couple of year ago), but the bottom line is that eventually dollar devaluation wins and oil goes higher. This warning signal is a problem for the establishment because they don’t want the public to realize that dollar devaluation is the issue. If the public knew that, then the public would realize that the establishment elites are the cause.
In turn, the elites and the Biden Admin are using the Ukraine war as a distraction to divert blame. Russian oil sanctions have little to no bearing on US oil supplies, but massive fiat printing of dollars by the Federal Reserve does.
The central bank has created tens of trillions of dollars from thin air since the credit crash of 2008 in order to hold the US economy back from complete deflationary collapse. But this was always a stop-gap and the Fed and the establishment knew that the resulting inflation would eventually strike, it was only a matter of time.
In 2020 alone, the Federal Reserve created $6 trillion of new money supply in the wake of foolish and unnecessary nationwide covid shutdowns. This in combination with the destabilization in markets caused by the response to the pandemic is leading to expanding inflationary pressures. THIS IS A FACT. It is not covid. It is not Russia. The cause of inflation is and always will be dollar printing by the Fed. PERIOD. Everything else is peripheral to the primary culprit.
Beyond the advantage of using Russia as a smokescreen to hide their culpability for destructive inflation, the establishment is also very interested in a carbon control agenda. These same elites have been calling for higher gas prices for years. Why? Because higher gas prices would force the public to accept the Green New Deal agenda as the only alternative. Carbon controls mean governments would be able to micro-manage every aspect of business, manufacturing, trade, even the way we function in our homes or the number of children we are allowed to have.
For those that actually believe in global warming nonsense posited by leftists and government paid researchers, I would remind them that even the NOAA admits that in the past century temperatures have risen a mere 1 Degree Celsius.That’s right, just one degree in over a hundred years. Gee, that’s terrifying. Where do I sign my life and freedoms away? I don’t want to have to deal with a more thorough tan.
Furthermore, there is no hard scientific proof whatsoever that this 1 degree increase was caused by carbon emissions. None. Zip. Zero. There are plenty of rigged experiments and rigged data that have been exposed in the past, but nothing concrete to show any correlation between carbon and rising temps. (I’ll give you a hint of what has the most influence on Earth’s temperatures – It’s the size of one million Earths, it’s on fire, and you can often see it hovering above us in the sky).
Carbon emissions policies serve no practical purpose but they do serve a nefarious purpose as a means to dictate the lives of the average citizen on a micro level.
It is perhaps not coincidental that puppets like Stephen Colbert and other leftists have suggested that $15 is a fair price for gasoline. Independent studies by groups like the Institute for Energy Research show that Green New Deal measures including carbon taxes would ultimately result in gas spiking to around $13 per gallon. Add in some market speculation and prices would probably plateau around $15. But hey, if prices are already hitting historic highs because of inflation and war, then why not go along with carbon restrictions as well? No one will be able to afford the cost of driving anywhere anyway. See how that works?
To summarize, the elites are happy about rising oil prices today because first, they now have a perfect scapegoat for the disasters inflation will reap; disasters they are responsible for. And second, they now have a backdoor way to introduce their carbon agenda, starting with forced public dependency on expensive and less efficient green technologies and slowly progressing towards total carbon restrictions.
Average leftists are happy about rising gas prices because they ignorantly believe that sanctions on Russian oil hurt Putin. They also ignorantly believe in global warming and they don’t realize how drastically our standard of living will be reduced in the name of carbon dictatorship. In other words, this isn’t a conspiracy to force people to buy electric cars; most people can’t afford a Tesla anyway. But it is a conspiracy to undermine our prosperity and our freedoms through inflationary crisis as well as green energy mandates. Leftists have no understanding of this. They are happy because they are dumb.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 03/13/2022 – 23:45
Zero Hedge’s mission is to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public, to skeptically examine and, where necessary, attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become, to liberate oppressed knowledge, to provide analysis uninhibited by political constraint and to facilitate information’s unending quest for freedom. Visit https://www.zerohedge.com