Musings of a Dumb Ass

Musings of a Dumb Ass......... We Americans just aren't very good at asking the right questions, instead preferring to take whatever's the popular spin of the moment as factual and never thinking beyond the screen of the television set. The questions that should be asked are ridiculously simple and we should be ashamed that no one asks them. One of the things about the status of crude oil that should be noted is for oil imported from the Middle East, the 'lifting cost', or what it costs to produce a barrel of crude has changed very little in more than ten years. The present cost to produce a barrel of crude in Saudi Arabia is about $2.00 per barrel which exposes one hell of a stretch to the current charge of about $60.00 per barrel on the world market. This just raises a multitude of questions, all of which are never asked by The American Public. Saudi Arabia says it has no control over the escalating costs of crude even though little has changed in its own economy in forty years, so are they reluctantly accepting that $58.00 difference between cost and price and painfully depositing it in their own banks owned by the royal family to be disturbed only to buy a large share of the dollars we are printing so their most important customer... The USA... doesn't suffer a financial collapse? Another fact to ponder is the current cost to produce a barrel of crude in Iraq is about a dollar. This is a country that we are destined to invest three trillion dollars in to bring democracy to those who are more interested in when they can get their electricity turned back on and get the Americans out than to pursue the voting booth. For those who need to see all those zeros, here's what 3 trillion dollars looks like. $3,000,000,000,000.00 And you can look forward to paying every dime of it but you cannot find (at least I can't) what's happening to the oil Iraq is currently producing, how much revenue is it bringing in, where it's going, or even who the customers recieving it are! Yet no one is questioning anything about it. Why? Am I the only one to wonder about things like this? We've become unable to think about too many things that gave us strength, power, and dignity and have given over to living through today taking whatever is easiest, letting someone else set the rules and standards we live by and staggering on towards tomorrow with no conception of what tomorrow might hold for us and even worse, without the ability to dream about the impossible. This has brought us to a place of unbelievability in the marketplace. Currently General Motors is staggering around in circles trying to keep from collapsing under the load of an average 27 dollar an hour production line employee who's cost to the company baloons to an incredible $73.73 per hour when the benefits are added in. The cost for employee group health insurance paid out by General Motors annually is a whopping 5 billion 600 million dollars and costs the company more than the raw steel used to build their cars annually, falling in at about $1500.00 per car for health insurance costs alone! At the moment, General Motors and their direct associates are looking to cut 54,000 of the top paying jobs in this country, while most of us are either admiring those new Toyotas or praying for one. On second thought, maybe we're just too stupid to think of the questions that should be asked.................