China vs the US – The Battle for Oil
January 5th, 2008 1 comment link to (permalink) posted by david
China is perhaps too different from the US culturally and not different enough ideologically for there to be an immediate threat of actual war, however history shows that competition for natural resources tends to cause conflict.
For now, its more natural to secure a beachhead for access to oil resources by fighting against people who are both close enough and just different enough for there to be natural animosity. We fight people who believe in another branch of the Abrahamic religion, Islam rather than Christianity. In the global scheme of things, this is a hair splitting difference not dissimilar from Shia vs Sunni. These people have the resources that the US may eventually end up at war with China over.
Places that have wealth built on natural resources favor bullies who can grab it rather than the educated who have an upper hand when wealth needs to be created rather than mined. Places rich in natural resources: The Democratic Republic of the Congo; Saudi Arabia and Texas are therefore inherently pugnacious and anti-intellectual. From these places fighting springs naturally.
The battle in the subject of this movie is metaphorical. It could very well be figurative.
50 min 6 sec Jan 4, 2008
1 response so far »
OilMonkey : Jan 8, 2008 at 4:31 pm
“Places that have wealth built on natural resources favor bullies who can grab it rather than the educated who have an upper hand when wealth needs to be created rather than mined.”
First, wealth — in monetary or “financial instrument” forms — is but an agreed upon volatile fiction; and second, since (in our reality) matter cannot be created or destroyed (only rearranged) real wealth occurs when a single human primate, or group of human primates, exploits available resources at the expense of other human primates (such resources are always mined one way or another, doesn’t matter if they are human, information or natural resources).
As for resource grabbing bullies, they come in all shapes and sizes, educated, uneducated and everything in between.
The good, old U S of A is perhaps the greatest example to date of the educated bully brand of “wealth creation” (a/k/a grabbing):
“Most people reading this are haves. So am I. We are implicated. It is written in the Tao te Ching: “Prosperity rests on disaster; disaster is hidden in prosperity.” This is true of our prosperity, whether Republicans or Democrats rule Congress and the White House. If our leaders are criminals that should come as no surprise, for we live on theft. We’ve invented polite words for our theft (”capitalism,” “the global economy,” “the free market”), but in fact it takes a lot of muscle and legalized theft for 5% of Earth’s population to gobble 50% of its resources. Our way of life is a criminal enterprise, and it takes criminals to run it. For more than a century we’ve depended upon thinly veiled criminality for our good fortune, and we damn well are implicated.”
- Michael Ventura, If New Orleans were dry
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