Stephen Lendmen at the left-leaning GlobalResearch has an OpEd piece about the U.S. and the military drive for Venezuela. While I don’t necessarily agree with his views completely, he has some good information on the reasons for the U.S.’ desire to oust Chavez. If Venezuela truly has 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, controlling that resource would make sense for a military reliant on fuel and fuel sources.

The Post and Courier has an article titled Canada hurting U.S. oil production which asks a question many are starting to ask — why isn’t the U.S. government reducing restrictions on local oil extraction? The thought that Canada’s cheaper labor and reduced restrictions is hurting U.S. production doesn’t seem realistic to me — it is the U.S.’s nationalization of many oil-rich lands as well as the outrageous regulations and restrictions to the point of monopolization of the local oil industry. Huge barriers to competition in the U.S. oil industry make it cheaper for most oil companies to go international. The conspiracy spin there is that the U.S. government might want to deplete foreign oil reserves in order to dominate the world oil market in the future, but I don’t think politicians think that far out.

HelenaIR has an article titled Regional oil price gap narrows that talks about the huge problems in the U.S. oil market — namely a restriction of the number of refineries and the problems that causes for supply. A reduced supply due to refinery monopoly ends up producing a higher cost, so why isn’t the U.S. working to deregulate that industry? If you look closer at most local governments, almost all of them have their own proprietary blend they require gas stations to sell. Why is this? Namely to produce paternalism and cronyism for local industries friendly to those in power. When will residents realize that it is their own local governments that are creating the high cost of gasoline, not just the state and federal powermongers?

New Europe quotes Shell in saying that World oil not running out but difficult to exploit. I’m a firm believer that Peak Oil won’t happen for generations, if at all. Shell forgets to mention that the biggest oil supply problems comes from too much regulation, nationalization and foreign occupation in an industry that could be much more competition if the various States allowed competition. We only have to look at the other failures of government-run businesses to understand why oil is so expensive, and why it will only become more expensive.

Investor’s Business Daily talks about the upcoming hurricane season and how forecasters believe it will be just as bad as last year. With most of the U.S. monopoly refinery industry located in a hurricane-attracting region, will we see another summer of fuel refining outages as we did last year?

Discuss this article at the oil report forum.

Reuters just announced minutes ago that left-wing rebels in Columbia have blown out a portion of the second largest oil pipeline in that country. This comes just days before the Presidential election, in a decades-long war between the right and left wing militias.

Columbia’s left-wing rebels have been financed primarily by the drug trade, so upsetting the oil supply will have little effect on their side of the war. The company that manages some of the oil production and distribution is Occidental, which just had their Ecuadorian oil fields siezed through nationalization. Occidental is the U.S.’s fourth largest oil company. They ship about 340,000 barrels of oil a day to the U.S.