…with the oil?
Responding to a fellow Caricom member’s concerns about high oil prices, Eric Williams once quipped, “oil don’t spoil”. One wonders what he would’ve said about the present situation when oil is headed to US$10/bl and lower – when it was at $68/bl at the beginning of the year. In a vicious slugfest over market share since last year, the two behemoths Russia and Saudi Arabia ramped up production, putting severe pressure on oil prices – only to be hit with the coronavirus pandemic. Talk about a one-two combination!!
With every country in the world practising lockdown of one sort or another, industries – all of which use oil in one form or other to keep their production lines moving – have been closing faster than “touch-me-not” leaves!! The result has been a surplus of oil such as the world has never seen. If the Ancient Mariner were around, he would’ve been moaning, “oil, oil everywhere, and not a drop to be sold”!! Right now, the world has run out of underground caves to store oil, much less tanks. Super tankers are now being rented not to ship oil – nobody’s buying! – but merely to store it until the pincer movement on oil stops.
And since no one knows when that blessed moment will arrive – we can expect that within a month, most oil companies will be capping their wells, faster than the aforementioned “touch-me-nots”!! They’ve already pulled back US$100 billion in exploration and drilling investments – even as the once safe US shale oil, which catapulted the US to being a net oil exporter –\ can’t attract a dime!!
Now you may be scratching your head, Dear Reader, wondering why your Eyewitness is worrying about the world oil market when our dear land of Guyana is still roiling from its own pincer movement of election fraud by the PNC and the coronavirus from China. Well, his attention was caught by a small article reporting that the Environmentalist-as-Energy-Czar Bynoe has had to extend for the second time, the bidding by international oil traders for Guyana’s share of the oil being pumped from the Stabroek block.
Well, he hopes that Bynoe isn’t holding his breath!! Fact of the matter is – in case he doesn’t realise it since environmentalists mightn’t understand how markets work – oil prices are plummeting faster than the acceleration of gravity because there are no markets!! And as such, why would oil traders buy oil that they can’t sell??
And this brings us to the PNC, which have rigged an election in full view of the world – all because they wanted to get their grubby (big) paws on the “oil bonanza”!!
There is a god!!
…with the PNC and rigging elections
Some folks from the PNC benches are getting bolder with their anti-democratic arguments to justify their blatant rigging that’s still unfolding. We’re now being told that because the “PNC’s constituency” is a “minority”, the only way they can get into Government is to rig. But this isn’t new, is it?? This is the same excuse Burnham and the PNC used for rigging elections between 1968 and 1985!! Your Eyewitness has a question for these PNCites: “Are they repeating the exercise because they approve of the consequences of Burnham’s rigging?”
Your Eyewitness knows it’s been a while but does the “PNC constituency” remember that by 1989, the riggers had plunged Guyana in every socio-economic ranking to have it hover precariously just above the basket case Haiti? Do they remember that our national poverty rate was almost 50 per cent?? But for the “PNC constituency” it was even higher??
Do they remember that the PNC destroyed the middle class of its constituency that had been painfully (very painfully) created in the 150 years since the abolition of slavery??
Why?
…about “foreign meddling”
There’s the Chronic’s headline: “Inquiry needed into int’l interference in Guyana’s electoral process – PM Nagamootoo”.
So will Russia investigate the US, UK, EU, Canada, OAS, Commonwealth, Caricom, etc, after their hackers were deported??
