This is it imo Goff lays it all out he has a brilliant grasp of the situation the World is in re Peak Oil.
By
Stan Goff
The American ruling class is perfectly aware of this, and they are also aware that their power is ultimately political - that the ruination of the masses in the United States will lead to an upheaval that could undermine or even end that power. So they are playing a game of retrenchment. This is not the game of the strong, but the game of a desperately weak system.
In 1945, the US share of global product was 50%. It is half of that now. The US now imports 60% of its petroleum. The American trade deficit is half a trillion dollars. The federal debt is over $6 trillion, 60% of GDP. In 1980, that figure was $1 trillion, or 33% of GDP. My own hypothesis is not complicated, once the question of dollar hegemony is understood. As the monetary position of US power is continually weakened by debt and overhang, the existing capital accumulation regime is increasingly obliged to force a change on the world so it will accept yet another restructuring, just as Nixon forced the last restructuring on his reluctant allies. There are two aspects to this enforcement - the industrialized metropoles ("where the money is") and the periphery/ semi-periphery, where this mass of superfluous people is now a drag anchor on continued accumulation. This drag, from the standpoint of the accumulation regime, must be systematically cut loose.
There is an international class war going on, and one reason we only see the military dimension of it is that we only look at the economic indices. This tells the story of "unequal exchange" in the realm of money, but it does not explain what is happening in the material substrates of the system, nor does it explain why petroleum in particular is unlike other commodities.
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http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/120604_material_accumulation.shtml
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