"the way, American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. And you know that whole suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer … that was me, people."
I have a (conspiracy?) theory that Obama ramped up oil production to choke the economies of Russia and OPEC members Libya, Iran, and Venezuela.
I mean, that hardly sounds like a conspiracy. In hindsight, expanding fracking is such an obvious economic policy lever that would have been available to a) stimulate some regional economies in the US and Canada, accelerating the US's GDP recovery and b) fuck with OPEC's ability to influence the global supply of oil. When oil prices plummeted in 2014 and plunged Venezuela into a depression, the effects of US/Canada production weren't the least bit subtle.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That is factually the case. The only question is how large Obama’s role in leading (or not putting a stop to/slowing down) that ramp up was
Better theory: he did it just to laugh at Romney's "Russia is our greatest geopolitical foe" gaff.
No I will not check if he started that in his first term.
It's not a theory, it's just realpolitic. Strategists have been advocating for American energy independence for YEARS after the OPEC blockade tanked the economy in the 70's. American oil and energy sectors have been marketed as "national security" issues, thus all the subsidies.
Obama is right in his analysis, there's plenty of shit he's done that is absolutely evil but thinking that he's trying to imply that third world countries should stay poor because of this speech is bad analysis.
It may be bad analysis in the abstract, but together with his body language, the very deliberate phrasing he choses you can almost see the gears in his head spinning, trying to come up with empty rhetoric that sounds reasonable and fair but avoids at any cost going past very vague platitudes and terminal inoffensiveness. Re-watch it again, it's like the Flint water lip wetting all over again.
It's because:
a) Libya had Gaddafi as leader, who opposed US hegemony b) The World Bank, IMF, and WTO love war, because it allows them to swoop in with their bullshit loans, which are always predicated on like "Oh you need a trillion dollars because the governments we support destroyed everything in your country? Alright, we can give you that, just completely deregulate your markets, privatize everything, and allow our corporate criminal friends to buy out everything." This of course allows for the capitalist project to continue.
