I haven’t “opened me trap” in a while. Had plenty to write about but so much other stuff going on that takes time too. But the Energy Companies Cartel and the Fossil Fuel Cartel have started to seriously piss me off. I predicted on older blog posts that the ECC and FFC would start to pump prices up - and that was before the Ukraine-Russia war - because they can smell their own blood in the water.
I said they’d try to gouge as much money as they could out of customers, and they’ve started. The pretext of the war is just that, a pretext, and a false one at that. The price of Saudi oil going up was just the start of The Big Bite that they’re now all putting on us, and they all jumped on it gleefully.
Remember this?
When the Coalition (grudgingly!) removed part of the fuel excise, the FFC gleefully didn’t pass all of it on to us, and when their extortion didn’t result in the reduced excise being forever, they banged prices up again.
And let’s face it, under the Coalition all the cartels had mates in government. Screw the commoners, this ragtag of inconsequential cash cows with stupid little illusions of being able to affect The Government and cut a better deal. All that’s changed now (well, a bit… Labor has to at least make some efforts to stay the course) and Albanese is going to herd the State governments into doing something about it.
Let me just say how extraordinarily Bizzarro-World I find this, that some State governments would NOT want to do the right thing for their populace and instead opt to keep them destitute in the face of energy corporations pretty much enslaving them.
Slaves?
I say enslaving because when your bare necessities of life cost almost your entire income, you ARE slaves. The chains are right there - “work for us, earn money but pay it to us, or you’ll die freezing starving and on the verge” - and that’s also the way to keep power out of the hands of the cash cows, because people who have no free time or money to effect a difference are - cows. A herd to be exploited.
Effed if ya do and effed if ya don’t
The article says Albo* faces a difficult task either way, but I’m not so sure on that. I know what I’d rather see. Gas companies told to buckle down to doing what they’re asked or GTFO, same with energy companies - let’s build 100% renewables / sustainables based energy systems, that way we can bank the difference and improve infrastructure to the point where energy becomes what it’s always needed to be, which is PRACTICALLY FREE and PERFECTLY CLEAN.
* Have you noticed how differently we all say “Albo” as compared to “Scomo” or “Scummo”? Sort of says it all, really.
I said back in this post that I thought our “democratic” system was not quite right when two reports of the same thing were so contradictory. Basically that was so that some confusion arose around the billions of dollars ECC energy providers were starting to see in profits due to the extremely low cost (in fact, free) of the actual energy when there’s no longer a need to BUY, haul, handle, and carry fuel.
How the bullshit works
So they use bullshit to obfuscate and create the impression that they’re in dire straits. So one article read that the energy system was in for “a billion-dollar shock” while the other called it “A billion-dollar windfall." Yeah, that kind of bullshit. You can see that all they can see at this stage is a huge pile of dollar signs, and all they can see in the future is a *tragic whimper* shrinking pile of dollar signs. . .
I’d almost weep for them except I realise what a great opportunity this is for them to cover the costs of setting up renewables / sustainables power plant and then not doing maintenance and letting it run down, whereupon they can whimper piteously and hold out one hand while pointing to smoking wind turbines and people freezing and dying of heat stroke with the other.
Where’s the money? We don’t know, honest!
“But where are those ‘billion-dollar windfalls’?” one will ask them, and they’ll make innocent faces and say “but it was - we made sure it was reported as - a billion-dollar shock…” and then they’ll sell the smoking ruin to a new successor after pocketing three quarters of the government handout given them because the government was worried about its citizens.
And of course the government is actually giving them OUR taxes because the bastards don’t pay taxes themselves - those ‘billion-dollar shocks,’ remember? If I can revert back to the Grumpy Old Guy paradigm here: Gimme an extension cord and a nice piece of copper and I’ll give them a real billion-dollar shock…
But in the spirit of “keeping the bastards honest” which is where we as a nation have been a bit lapsing in the last fifty to one hundred years, I’ve told you how things are going to go if we don’t get back to the keeping them honest thing. And with Albo and Labor, we actually stand a chance of doing it.
Sometimes, others follow our lead
I’m just going to point to one other example: We started to give credit to the OG owners of Australia by putting “on Bunnorung land” or whatever for about a year and a half, and now I’m seeing profiles with “on Jumanos land” etc around the world. (Jumanos being those peoples who inhabited parts of northern Mexico and Texas and New Mexico.)
When we start caning the energy companies’ arses, others will follow suit. Lean hard on your local MPs and politicians to do something, on CEOs and COOs and CFOs to stop doing what they’re doing to us. The former are supposed to be our allies, the latter are exploitative manipulative greedy dishonest pieces of shit and don’t deserve air to breathe.
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