WHEREAS, the price of oil has more than tripled since January of 1999, to over $35 per barrel, and threatens to go even higher over the coming weeks and months; and
WHEREAS, worldwide oil prices continue to rise despite increased production by OPEC nations, and release of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve; and
WHEREAS, the citizens of Boston, Massachusetts, and the New England States in particular, will face severe, and potentially deadly economic hardship this winter, due to increase in prices for home heating fuels; and
WHEREAS, as the physical economist Lyndon H. LaRouche has warned, the global inflation in petroleum prices threatens to detonate a chaotic breakdown in many, if not all nations of the world; and
WHEREAS, the petroleum price crisis is presently but one leading economic consequence of a general hyperinflation in financial asset-prices, now being expressed at increasing rates as a hyperinflation in commodity prices, following a trend similar to that suffered by Weimar, Germany during 1923; and
WHEREAS, the increasingly desperate effort to secure inflows of financial assets into the U.S. dollar sector, by means of various forms of speculative activity, seizes upon several combined opportunistic factors, to increase asset- price accumulations, through such means as: recent increased concentration of ownership of major oil companies through mergers and acquisitions, the increased role of the spot market in petroleum deliveries, the significance of denomination of deliveries in U.S. dollars, most especially the intensity of speculative dealings in the form of financial derivatives in this area, which threaten to bring the per-barrel price of petroleum to between $40 and $50 per barrel soon, and not much later, much higher; and
WHEREAS, only drastic measures taken in concert between and among our federal government and other sovereign national governments could bring this problem, in the short term, and the petroleum-price crisis itself under control; and
WHEREAS, appropriate action led by the U.S. government must aim at immediate emergency cooperation among the governments of principal petroleum-exporting and principal petroleum-consuming nations; and
WHEREAS, the actions of legislative groupings i.e., town and city councils, state legislatures and federal elected representatives must uphold the oath of office to defend and secure the General Welfare of all citizens; and
WHEREAS, the following actions proposed by economist Lyndon LaRouche to deal with that emergency situation contribute an important, and decisive step in the direction of moving the government of these United States to act in concert with other nations to solve the more general problem of the world's financial and monetary systems; now, therefore
BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF BOSTON:
That the City Council of Boston urges the President of the United States, the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives to take emergency action to reduce oil and natural gas prices; including the following measures:
a) Declare a general strategic emergency in the matter of stability of flows and prices of essential energy-supplies of national economies;
b)Establish contracts, directly between the U.S. government and the governments of petroleum exporting nations, of not less than twelve months government-scheduled deliveries of petroleum;
c)Define reasonable prices for these contracts;
d) On the grounds of a global strategy emergency in petroleum prices and supplies, set priorities on processing of such contracted petroleum flows through relevant refiners to priority categories of consumers in the United States, causing other stocks to be shunted to one side in the degree that these priority deliveries must be processed first;
e) Urge governments of other oil-consuming nations to take these same actions, in the context of this global strategic emergency;
f) Investigate petroleum market manipulation, through financial derivatives speculation or other unfair speculative practices, and probe allegations that some portion of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve recently released for the benefit of citizens of the Northeastern United States, are in fact being exported overseas for profit by U.S. refineries;
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the City Council of Boston urges the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts General Court, and other state and local governments of the United States to support these emergency actions in the vital interest of the General Welfare of its citizens.