James Stout

Because it'll raise their production prices because shutting down their own production and having an excuse to shut down their own production, like we'll let them just knock off oil refineries so they can reduce the amount of oil in the market.

The system of oil is designed to get around these blockades, right?

This is a big part of the reason for the transition from coal to oil.

Specifically, it was like the U.S.

and the Marshall Plan was trying to defeat these extremely militant French unions after World War II.

And these unions were largely coal mining base and they were like, oh shit, we can do a pivot to Saudi Arabia to move to oil.

And this can be our solution to crush these coal mining unions because oil is extremely hard to unionize.

It has a highly divided workforce.

You know, and so they tried to design a system that doesn't have choke points.

The problem is, there's one fucking big one, and that one big one is the Strait of Hormuz.

And at this point, the sort of advantage of the system, right, which is that it's all these different nodes that are, like, bound together in this, like, extremely convoluted weave, the strength of the system is also its weakness.

It means that we're all getting dragged down together, right?

with the system when it stops working because we all rely on stuff from all over the world.

The way that the system has bound us all together means that we're all reliant on every other part of the economy and we're all reliant on oil.

And this is sort of the root of the catastrophe and also the reason why this crash is operating in slow motion.

In order to stop the international labor movement, the system was set up in a specific way where it works along nodes and is supposed to be designed to deal with a crisis like this.

So instead of collapsing immediately, it collapses in slow motion.

But it is still collapsing because capital, and I guess like the presidency of the United States, has taken the action that the system was designed to avoid, which is like, you know, like a large scale blockade of production.

And the consequences of this are both dire and expanding as we speak.

Yeah, this has been, it could happen here.